Office romances are as inevitable as death, taxes and Southern California freeway traffic. In my experience, it is impossible to try to put a ban on human nature and stop people who work together from getting together.

A New York Times story this week — “Boss’s Memo: Go Ahead, Date (With My Blessing)” the same point: “Despite years of stern warnings about the pitfalls of seeking love in the shadow of the water cooler—touched off by the heightened consciousness of sexual harassment in the 1990s—more workers think dating a colleague is not only acceptable, but logical.”

As anyone who watches the NBC comedy “The Office” knows, public workplace romances are a hot trend right now. A CareerBuilder survey earlier this year found that the number of workers who are keeping an office romance a secret has dropped from 46 percent in 2005 to 34 percent this year. And, about half of the workers surveyed by CareerBuilder say they have dated a co-worker at some point.

The Times story seems to be pegged to past workplace policies that prohibited office romances, but those policies never really did much to stop humans doing what humans will inevitably do. Like the 18th Amendment, which launched Prohibition, all a public ban ever does is drive the behavior underground, therefore giving it the added allure of being ultra-forbidden.

What the Times story doesn’t get into all that much is the pragmatic reason for discouraging office romances: because all too often they go bad. Spoiled office romances leave the participants—and the co-workers around them, who have to live with the bitter, sometimes litigious aftermath—much worse off as a result.

Anyone who values their job knows better than to get involved romantically with someone at work. It can be a career-killer if handled badly (as so many office romances are) and takes the focus off the job at hand: the work. “Fishing off the company pier” has never been a good practice, and although love in the office today may be much more acceptable and commonplace, smart people know that it’s still a star-crossed idea.