I understand why “professionalism” and everything means that workplace romances, or family, etc are bad.
It’s still horrible, and a cost to be reckoned with, for it seems the cost for avoiding corruption is measured in a fraction of our soul.
Six to one, half dozen to the other.
Workplace romance has some significant risks, practically, morally, and legally (primarily for the company) but it’s quite traditional for many cultures, and I don’t think it’s inherently immoral.
Indeed, Walmart lost a German supreme Court case against its anti-workeplace romance policy, on freedom of association grounds I think.
I think the primary issue I have with workplace romance it’s when it’s of the employer/employee kind, because skeevy power dynamics
isn’t the primary issue not that they are impure, but that they are a bad idea, because what if you break up and still have to see each other at work?
“Impure” and “bad idea” are not unrelated concepts. Once a particular norm takes root amongst respectable right-thinking people, for whatever reason, deviation from it is quickly going to become a manifestation of impurity. Because pure people always do the respectable right-thinking thing.
*****
There’s a general trend, I think, towards expanding the spheres of life where romantic/sexual interaction – any non-bureaucratized non-bloodless interaction, really, but especially the romantic/sexual kind – is deemed toxic. And there’s usually a plausible reason for it, in that any given space usually has a function, and messy uncontrolled human interactions have a way of screwing with that function for everyone. But, as the OP suggests, this does kind of make life more…hollow.