The coupling that I described needs to be in the software because it exists in the real world that the software is trying to describe.

However your "compile time" point is important. There is another solution, which is to implement lazy loading of those classes.

So you put your import in the method of each that needs to know the other. This breaks the circular dependency and needs more up front memory. However it can also become a maintenance issue where a forgotten import in one function is masked by a successful import in another, until something changes the call and previously working code mysteriously goes boom.

It's all tradeoffs.