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You can't romance your Avowed companions because Obsidian didn't want the RPG's platonic relationships to suffer
In Avowed, Obsidian's upcoming RPG, romance will not be available due to the studio's decision to focus on other companion-related features.
You won't be able to romance your companions in Avowed, because the upcoming RPG's developers wanted to make sure that it got all of the game's relationships right - romantic or not.
In an interview with Windows Central, creative director Carrie Patel reiterated that 2we don't have romance in Avowed." Despite the fact that Obsidian acknowledges that "it's something that many players love," it sounds as though concerns about scope meant that your relationships will remain purely platonic.
"We wanted to make sure that, if we were to include it, [we] included an equally meaningful non-romance path," Patel explains. "Given how much we were investing in our companions as characters who are really tied to the central story in a way that they haven't been in many of our previous games, we wanted to make sure that if we were going to do romance, we were going to really, really, really do it right - or not at all."
Patel mentions that Obsidian had "considered the investment required" to bring in romance as a notable feature, but that the eventual decision was made "to focus on other aspects of our companions." That certainly sounds as though questions were asked about bandwidth - Avowed, after all, is Obsidian's fantasy answer to sci-fi RPG series The Outer Worlds, which itself is something of an answer to Fallout. Obsidian's RPGs are deliberately smaller than the Bethesda games they're offering an alternative too, so I can see that the studio would avoid features that could risk adding a sense of bloat to the game.
Elsewhere in the interview, Patel had something similar to say about Avowed's lack of multiplayer. Praising Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian, she says that "what's important to us is making sure we have a really solid campaign," and that while RPG co-op isn't "unsolvable," some studios have had years of practice. Patel, by contrast, is focusing on "delivering on the things that players come to an Obsidian RPG expecting, which is a really well-developed story, meaningful choices and consequences, and the ability to be the agent of change in the world."