OFFICE ROMANCES BLOOMING; RULES BEING REVISED AS TRENDS SHOW RISE IN WORKPLACE DATING.

Byline: Elsa C. Arnett Knight-Ridder Newspapers

Sex in the office isn't just a White House issue.

From corporate offices, to coffee shops to the Marine Corps, romance is sweeping the American workplace, with growing numbers of men and women squeezing liaisons in between meetings, memos and coffee breaks.

Offices are so awash with amorous e-mails these days that some workplace experts suggest the trend might partially explain the public's surprisingly strong support for President Clinton, despite allegations that he had an affair with a young White House intern.

Strong recent growth in the number of working women, increasing management emphasis on close workplace teamwork, and longer hours being put in by managers and professionals are helping to fuel the dating trend, experts say.

Many workers are aware of romances where they work, so they aren't surprised at the idea of an intimate relationship in the White House offices, they add.

``People are beginning to realize that when you're working 60 hours a week, that's where you're going to meet people,'' said Kathleen Reardon, a management professor at the University of Southern California. ``The old adage `Never mix business with pleasure' is so hard to adhere to now because things are so intertwined.''

For some, office romances have fairy-tale endings. Microsoft Corp. chief Bill Gates married a company marketing executive and they now have a daughter and a very, very large house. And in Congress, love blossomed on the drab House floor where Rep. Bill Paxon recently wooed and wed then-Rep. Susan Molinari in a proper New York Republican courtship.

But all too often, workplace relationships can turn ugly.

Last fall, Staples Inc. President Martin E. Hanaka lost his job amid rumors that he had an affair with his former secretary and assaulted her. The secretary also was fired. And a New York Wal-Mart employee sued her company after she was dismissed for committing adultery with a fellow worker.

It's not yet clear what price Clinton (and the nation) might pay over allegations that he had an affair with intern Monica Lewinsky.

But experts believe there has been a heavy price measured elsewhere in mounting numbers of sexual-harassment claims from failed romances.

The number of sexual-harassment complaints recorded by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has grown rapidly in the 1990s - from 6,883 in 1991 to 15,889 in 1997. Michael R. Brown, an employment attorney in Boston who handles a substantial load of sexual-harassment lawsuits, estimates that about a third involve failed consensual romances.

Not forbidden

Despite such difficulties, managers have been forced by the social realities of the modern workplace to retreat from official policies forbidding office romance.

At IBM, for example, an affair between a supervisor and subordinate once meant likely termination. Today, it just means that one can't supervise the other. AT&T used to have a strict, written policy that discouraged romances between any employees. Now the company has an informal, unwritten policy that frowns only on supervisors' dating their underlings.

The U.S. Army is working on finding a more flexible alternative to its ``no touch, no talk'' rule among its male and female recruits, and the Air Force has tweaked its ``fraternization'' policy four times since the mid-1980s.

The federal government has settled on a simpler solution. It does not bar its 1.8 million civilian employees around the nation from dating, although individual agencies can add their own restrictions.

``It's too intrusive, and there are privacy issues at stake,'' said Douglas Walker, a spokesman for the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, the federal government's human resources agency. ``We don't want to be Big Brother.''

More romance than ever

Office liaisons have ballooned over the past two decades as more women entered the work force and rose to more powerful positions, industry experts say.

A 1994 survey by the American Management Association, a New York-based management-training organization, found that 37 percent of women and 20 percent of men said they had had an office romance.

Co-workers are generally tolerant of such unions, with an important caveat.

The AMA found that three-quarters of 485 people surveyed think it's all right to date a co-worker, but only 23 percent approved of dating a superior and 21 percent approved of dating a subordinate.

Aside from school, the office is the most common place where people meet their spouses or significant others, according to Jack Erdlen, vice president of human resources for Romac International, a Tampa, Fla., corporate consulting firm. ``There's little doubt this issue has been with us since the days of Adam and Eve.''

But the issue has been getting trickier as more businesses operate in teams with people working more intimately. Late nights poring over a stack of documents with take-out Chinese food, and long, lonely business trips spent in deluxe hotels are volatile formulas for flings.

Monica Lewinsky and Clinton had their first intimate encounter one quiet day in November 1995 when most of the White House staff was out because of a budget showdown with Congress, according to an affidavit from her former office buddy, Linda R. Tripp, that was reported in The Washington Post.

``You enjoy the victories and suffer the pains of loss together and that draws you closer,'' said Reardon of USC, who also wrote ``They Just Don't Get It, Do They?'' a 1995 book on workplace relations. ``You end up sharing things that even your spouse can't understand.''