The forced nature of relationships in this game certainly seems to be something of a negative, and it's not just contained to M&J. Giving people forced moments, forced feelings, etc, negates not only the choices themselves but also the feeling of choice for the player if they generally avoided a character yet get forced into scenes that you would think they shouldn't be in given their relationship status with that character, i.e. staying with Bella in ep 5 even if the player has a bad relationship with her.
If you're going to do that kind of thing in your game, then you either don't have such choices or simply make the choices less impactful to the relationships since it's obvious that the overall narrative requires that these characters remain part of the game in some way or another. It's that illusion of choice, making people think that avoiding a certain character means they can get rid of them from the story, that is proving problematic for some people.