It is probably a good idea that Cambridge University has banned personal relationships between staff and students.
This month a new set of rules went into effect that prohibit any sexual acts between them, or anything that looks or sounds like a sexual act (‘My, my, Professor, is that a big ruler in your pocket or are you just happy…’ etc. etc., no student has ever said).
Most people would agree that this is sensible: a clear and sensible set of guidelines to protect students and staff from a situation where anyone could be accused of abuse of power.
Apparently, there have been cases of staff members matching with students on dating apps, and these new rules make it absolutely clear that in such a scenario, you should swipe right on over to the handsome poetry professor and not even entertain the idea of a little flirtation over Sonnet 116.
The new rules bring Cambridge into line with other British universities, including Oxford, UCL and Exeter, which already ban such relationships outright. As I said, it is sensible, responsible and a safeguard.
Nearly 20 years ago, Sophia Money-Coutts began a two-and-a-half-year relationship with one of her university tutors.
At the same time… maybe a little unromantic?
Almost exactly 20 years ago, I started my first year at university and fell madly in love with one of my tutors.
He taught political philosophy (of course he did), and I sat in his classes thinking things like, “Is there anything more attractive than a man who knows Rousseau?” (I was 19. We can all be insufferable at 19.)
He wore three-piece suits and polished shoes. He had an absolutely dry sense of humor. Toward the end of the year, I sent him an email telling him he had ruined our mock exam date (all correspondence and essays were sent by email), in which I made a terrible and questionable joke about my blondeness and basically dared him to have a drink.
I’ll spare you the details because they’re not worthy, but long story short, we went out for a drink, and that drink turned into a two-year relationship.
Two years? Maybe two and a half years. I don’t remember exactly because it was decades ago, but they were wonderful.
I fell in love for the first time, having been raised on an almost exclusive diet of Jane Austen books and adaptations, and I was giddy about it.
If there was any imbalance, it was on my part, because I went after him with all the courage and determination of a woman who had just left a seven-year women’s boarding school.
Sophia says it’s probably a good idea that Cambridge University has banned personal relationships between staff and students.
I sent her sunflowers from the start, convinced that women could send flowers to men just as easily as they could to us; I recorded a James Blunt CD for her (shame on me); we sent long, sweet emails that first summer while we were both traveling.
And he bought me a book of poetry by Edgar Allan Poe. I finally knew what it was like to have a person, my person, to go to sleep with and wake up next to. To text with. To talk with. To hold hands with in a restaurant. To go on vacation with on weekends (until we went on vacation our last weekend, two years later, to Amsterdam, where we parted ways just before a tour of the Anne Frank museum, and I spent the entire trip walking through those narrow rooms sobbing out loud).
“My God, that poor girl is really affected by this museum,” I could see other tourists thinking.
He was no longer teaching me when we started dating because I had already graduated from second year and finished his course.
But we still kept it a secret, thinking it was probably a smart move, ignoring each other at the library or wherever everyone went to get noodles at lunchtime.
This used to make my friend Emily mad, because she knew I was dating a tutor, but she didn’t know who. “You just missed out,” she’d say, if she and I were having lunch together at the café and he came in for a coffee.
It was fun and sexy, and the age difference wasn’t that big. Sometimes I tell people this story and they picture a grumpy old man, but I was 20 when we had our first date and he was 34.
He was, and remains, one of the kindest, brightest, most thoughtful people I know, with a brain the size of the moon, and I learned a lot from our relationship: communication skills, a fair amount about football, and why not to break up with someone just minutes before walking past the Anne Frank House.
He was certainly more grown up and considerate than the men my age I might have dated.
Thanks to him, I have also improved my musical taste. Best of all, he has remained so close to my family (after our disastrous break-up weekend in Amsterdam) that, a few years ago, he married a later girlfriend at my father and stepmother’s house in Spain. How about a modern relationship?
I’m proud of it and I love the memories. I look back at pictures of that period now and my heart aches a little when I think of how devotedly and simply I loved him, how easy it was compared to some of my later relationships, when more baggage made things more complicated, less trusting, when there was more angst.
So it’s probably a good thing that Cambridge has changed the rules because I’m sure a lot of mistakes on campus are quite different and the power imbalance is more pronounced. I’m just saying that it doesn’t always have to be that way, because it wasn’t in my case.
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