I was an intelligence officer in the Air Force. I was a highly educated and trained professional, commissioned after I graduated university, not an enlisted recruit who joined at 17. (I did join the Marine Corps reserves at 17 to help pay for college, but that was one weekend a month and a little training in the summer, and it frankly felt more like a frat party than anything else. It was certainly not professional work experience.)

When I was 25, I was pretty much at the stage of career development most professionals at that age are at, meaning I was pretty new, almost brand new.

To answer your question, if somebody came to me and said they were being pressured, then of course I would act to stop unethical and unprofessional behavior.

I have done that. Before I retired, I co-owned and co-managed a large plastics recycling plant. I was primarily responsible for managing sales and materials purchasing, but since none of my partners were interested in the boring details of HR, I liaised (in my spare time, lol) with the firm we outsourced our payroll and HR to.

So, I'm pretty familiar with Michigan and federal law when it comes to protecting employees, and I was never remiss in my duties in that respect.

We didn't tolerate any kind of bullying or harassment at work, not just because of laws, because it's the right thing to do. And because we wanted people to like being employed there. We wanted our workplace to be a safe and positive workplace. We had a steady line of applicants just by word of mouth to, so we probably succeeded.

But to me, safety would not have meant interfering with people's personal lives. It wouldn't have meant that I felt that I had the right to torpedo a relationship just because it might hypothetically become problematic in the future.

I limited myself to taking action for problems that actually existed, like someone actually being pressured or harassed.

This is what's so puzzles me about your story. In the first part, you write about an entirely positive relationship. You benefited from it professionally and personally, and you report no negative outcomes.

Then you say that you wouldn't tolerate a similar relationship among employees today, not because they're necessarily harmful, but because they might hypothetically become harmful in the right circumstances.

It's just a bit much for me. I mean, I partly get it. I just don't think I would want to work in an environment where my co-workers thought that they had the right to use power to interfere in my personal life when there were no actual problems coming from it.