Problematic Relationships
A lot of social theories that you see these days, coming from all sides of the political universe, hinge on the lots-of-good-fish-in-the-sea model of sex and romance. (Also other kinds of relationships, sometimes, but let’s just talk about sex and romance for now.) “Having a relationship with someone under $SOME_PARTICULAR_CIRCUMSTANCE poses a bunch of potential problems. So you should never do it, and we will punish you if you do! You can just go find a relationship with someone else!”
It turns out that this is a really broken model, especially for people who are not-totally-normal in any serious way. Humans are not fungible. When you meet someone, at least on some level, you will never meet anyone like that person again – and while in many cases the relevant differences aren’t very substantial, there are also many cases where they are. Sometimes staying away from someone means killing a beautiful, totally-irreplaceable thing. Sometimes one individual is the difference between a life of joy and a life of misery.
And that’s true even if that person is your boss. Or your professor. Or your first cousin. Or even your sibling, I guess. There are like a million of these, and they always seem incredibly distasteful and pointless until suddenly the person you love falls into the relevant category.
Now, to be clear: it’s not wrong to say “some circumstances make relationships many times riskier than normal, some circumstances are ripe for abuse and horror.” This is 100% accurate.
It is a cost. It gets weighed against the cost of “society has deemed that your love is A Problem and therefore forbidden regardless of how anyone involved actually feels,” which is a cost whose weight you should understand very well indeed, whatever your particular personal politics happen to be.
So how do you resolve a balance-of-costs problem?
Well, if you’re a policy-maker or a norm-setter, you can in fact just steamroll any objections and issue a blanket rule. And maybe the utilitarian calculus would justify that. Maybe you’re correct that the chances of victimization / cultural disease / birth defects / whatever are so much weightier than whatever-joy-will-come-out-of-these-unions that it makes sense to be the Relationship Police. But at the very least, this is a thing you should do solemnly, with a keen awareness that you are wrecking actual individual lives – and trampling on normal, culturally-key standards of individual autonomy in the realm of personal satisfaction – in order to achieve your aims.
Or you could try to introduce mitigation protocols. You could spread memes to the effect that relationships of Type X are minefields of potential disaster, much more so than other relationships on average, and therefore anyone entering into one would be wise to take precautions A B and C for the sake of his own welfare, and that doing so is a sign of love and faith-in-the-relationship rather than the reverse.
But, y’know, to do that you actually have to be willing to admit that sometimes a relationship of Type X is the right thing.
I’m not going to argue with the heart of this post, but I will at least point out where you are empirically wrong and how it connects to what @theunitofcaring just posted.
By and large the regime is not “these problematic relationships are banned” but more often “engaging in these forsakes the presumption of reasonable behavior and protection from moral accusations.”
Which is to say, you can date your secretary and most people won’t stop you. But if your secretary cries harassment, you will not get the benefit of the doubt. By dating your secretary, you are taking on the entire moral burden for anything going wrong.
This is in some ways better, because people who are desperate for the one true love only this can provide, get it. And a lot of normal relationships start this way and don’t suffer any rocky shoals, and it all works out. And many of the absolute worst cases still get prosecuted. There’s a reason this is the compromise society has muddled it’s way too.
But as the TUOC post says, “discretionary crimes”, where many people are engaged in the crime but we only enforce it when we feel like it, are an absolutely terrible moral hazard. Having laws or norms like that is a serious threat to stable society.
So it’s not like our situation is really any better than what you point out. But the dynamic does seem significantly different.
Which is to say, you can date your secretary and most people won’t stop you.
And a lot of normal relationships start this way and don’t suffer any rocky shoals, and it all works out.
Maybe your evidence pool is very different from mine, but…even in the cases where these things aren’t actually illegal (as they are with e.g. incest), our current iteration of polite society stigmatizes “problematic relationships” and “scary power dynamics” etc. way more than you’re giving it credit for. I have trouble imagining an educated creative-class type dating a subordinate, or a student, without the full force of near-universal condemnation coming down on it regardless of circumstance. Like “you’d probably get fired and your friends would definitely stop talking to you” condemnation.