Thanks for your reply!

Yes i also think this is a problem in the database.

This strucure gives more problems.
for example:
people can have relations with other people:
result john wife of mary
Which of course is silly....

One could make restrictions in what to enter based on gender field (for instance)
But.... in holland its possible to have gay marriage. So, if there was such a rule this wouldn't be a good model.
(john husband of joe. wouldn't be possible with this rule)

Further more there's the problem of 'how deep should you go'.
In this situation it would also be possible for two companies to be related. (and in my case it is)
This creates a problem when i want to find a person that is related to a company wich inturn is related to another company, wich is related to another company. etc.

So, yes this is a database problem, and yes this should be normalised, But...
I'm not exactly in the position to make this happen and users still want this data.

Is my only option to inform users that this isn't possible due to bad database design?

Thanks