Why such a contract?

With individuals spending more than 8-9 hours together a day, chances of office romance happening are very high. According to a poll 44% of romances in offices end in marriage, which implies that more than half of it, end up with break ups which in turn has negative repercussion for everyone. These relationships have a lot of adverse effects on the employer and the work environment (lower productivity, favoritism, poor employee morale, sexual harassment claims etc). Further, when a relationship goes bad, it might lead to poor publicity for the organization and/or a lawsuit being filed in some cases.
In order to tackle such issues companies are asking employees to sign "consensual relationship agreement" or the love contracts. The contract basically states that relationship is mutual, unrelated to the company and that any disputes arising from it will be settled through arbitration rather than lawsuit.
Another interesting thing is that companies become over conscious when the relationship is between a supervisory authority (or someone higher up in the organization) and a subordinate. This is to ensure that the supervisor is not abusing his authority and taking the advantage of his position (claims of sexual harassment in such cases are generally high which puts the organization in bad light and attracts unwanted publicity). In the given article also we find that Pritam was asked to sign the contract just before he was going to be promoted to the post Senior Manager HR. It is even more likely that these are the ones who’ll refuse the most to sigh such contracts. For example; Mark W. Everson, the President and CEO of the American Red Cross, was forced to resign from the posts because of his relationship with a female subordinate. He was married as well and of course he would not have signed a love contract.
However, it is to be kept in mind that these contracts are not that easy to enforce. In many cases employees do not agree on signing such contracts especially in the cases of extra marital affairs (as mentioned above). Moreover, many employees find it as an infringement on their personal lives (like Pritam).