Telangana: Companies Offer Leaves For Breakup Issues

Aditya, during his own breakup, said there were days when he “struggled to even get out of bed, let alone make it to the office”. But he felt that telling his boss or colleagues was a gamble because he could not predict the professional consequences. Some Indian employers have started writing relationship endings into leave rules.

A Bengaluru-based investment platform introduced up to a week of paid leave after a serious relationship breakdown in 2024, no questions asked. Another employer announced seven paid days from September 1 this year and described the leave as confidential. Indian labour law has no specific breakup-leave category, so these remain employer-created benefits. Hyderabad corporate employees said the wording itself creates problems around privacy, proof and misuse.

Research supports the premise that relationship loss can cause substantial psychological distress. A longitudinal study published in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Family Psychology found that a relationship ending was associated with increased psychological distress and lower life satisfaction. Neuroscience supports a narrower claim of overlapping brain responses to social rejection and experimentally induced physical pain in a 2011 PNAS study.

Dr Vishal Akula, professor and head of psychiatry at Government Medical College, Nizamabad, said breakup grief can involve the loss of companionship, routine, social identity and an imagined future. “There is no evidence-based number of breakup-leave days that would be clinically appropriate for everyone,” he said. One person may benefit from two or three days away, while another may need flexible hours, counselling, lighter duties or continued routine at work.

Privacy complicates even a confidential policy. Deepanita Ghosh, a corporate employee in Hyderabad, said, “If you take a paid ‘breakup’ leave labelled as such, it isn’t really confidential anymore.” She would prefer a broader mental-health leave category that does not require an employee to disclose the specific cause.

Another corporate employee, Abhijeet Bose, supports the idea but worries about proof and misuse. Divorce may come with legal documentation, he said, while a breakup leaves employers deciding whether a relationship was genuine. “And what happens if someone takes breakup leave and then gets back into a relationship with the same person?” he asked.

The harder question in an Indian office may come before the number of days.

A 2024 qualitative study published in BMC Public Health, based on the experiences of employees, HR professionals and counsellors in India, identified stigma, confidentiality concerns, fear of career consequences and lack of trust among barriers to disclosing mental-health difficulties at work. A policy can promise confidentiality, but an employee still has to decide whether choosing a leave category labelled “breakup” places information about a relationship into an employer’s system.

That unease appeared in a public discussion on Reddit this week; although the comments are anecdotal, one user replied to a question about paid breakup and divorce leave saying, “Me struggling to get a leave for fever here :(”. Another user joked that a manager might tell an employee to come to work and use the office as a distraction.

Those responses put the corporate policy in a different context. Dr Akula therefore favours broader terminology such as “personal crisis leave” rather than requiring workers to identify a breakup.

Such leave could allow immediate time away, while longer difficulties could be addressed through flexible hours, reduced workload, counselling or other support according to how the person is functioning. He also cautioned against treating absence as the answer for everyone. Work can provide routine and social contact for some people.