An observer of human relationships can easily observe that romantic relationships tend to turn off the rational part of the human brain, which is not great for

An observer of human relationships can easily observe that romantic relationships tend to turn off the rational part of the human brain, which is not great for corporate work. Who wants to be on the team whose boss just had a violently bad romantic ending with the boss two levels up, and now all your shiny computers are being taken away in favor of beat up netbooks, your office assignment has been mysteriously moved from the third-floor corner area to the janitor's closet in the basement, and every single person in the organization is now getting the worst possible ratings in their reviews? On the flip side, it may have been a lot more fun six months earlier when your adequate machines were replaced by awesome machines and you were moved out of the windowless second story room into the bright shiny third-floor corner, and you got a new beer tap and all-new office chairs and desks. But neither case is actually good for the company; both are deviations from the business-rational allocation of resources. And the bad case has an almost unbounded downside; entire departments can be destroyed by infighting if this happens at the executive level. Companies can pick who has a relationship with whom because they pick up the bill. They have a ton of skin in the game; in some situations it turns out the company had more skin in the "relationship" than the participants did, when the resulting blowout costs the company hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Note that in practice, relationships aren't banned but managed. It isn't necessarily a problem for even two employees who are in a bad relative position to become involved, because it's not like the company can really stop that. It is just necessary to move them around in a way to ensure that nobody is tempted to use the company in unethical ways in their relationship or to damage the company in either direction because of the relationship. Honestly, it's usually good even for the participants. Having multiple relationships in effect between two people is awkward at the best of times, like when you're in high school working the grocery store checkout and your teacher comes through, and suddenly you're trying to work out the social implications of the set intersection of "grocery customer" and "my school teacher, outside of school" social roles on the fly. When those two relationships are as powerful and complicated as "employment" and "romantic" relationship, just the sheer social/emotional stress of navigating that can be complicated and draining even for two well-intentioned individuals.