Charlie Brown got engaged!

But there's a bit of mystery surrounding the whole thing. Either he and his newly minted fiancee have only been dating for about five months or else they started dating while he was her boss. I heard a rumor that he was dating this girl and tried to confirm it with a colleague. She politely declined to comment, which actually did confirm it. Then Charlie Brown mentioned his "girlfriend" one day so I asked what her name was. He politely declined to tell me, which, again, only confirmed what I already suspected. Now comes the news of the engagement and I have to wonder if they were in fact dating while they worked together. Working for the same company is one thing, but dating your direct reports is highly inappropriate in my book, namely because it has the effect--intentional or not--of giving that direct report preferential treatment over her co-workers. There is just no way, no matter how impartial you think you might be, you can treat someone you are intimate with the same as you treat everyone else. But this is all speculation and I'm not really sure how to unravel it all. It's kind of like when a woman says she's expecting on such&such a date and when you do the backwards math you realize she was pregnant before the marriage...