It’s probably a good idea that the University of Cambridge has banned personal relationships between staff and students.
A new set of rules came into force this month which forbids any hanky panky between them, or anything that looks or sounds like hanky panky (‘My my, professor, is that a large ruler in your pocket or are you simply pleased…’ etc etc, said no student ever).
This, most people would agree, is sensible. A clear, judicious set of guidelines to protect students and staff from a situation where anyone could be accused of abusing their power.
Apparently, there have been cases of staff matching with students on dating apps, and these new rules make it absolutely clear that, in such a scenario, you should swipe over 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 various other British universities, including Oxford, UCL and Exeter, which already forbid such relationships outright. Like I said, sensible. Responsible. A safeguard.
Almost 20 years ago, Sophia Money-Coutts embarked on a two-and-a-half-year relationship with one of her university tutors
At the same time… maybe the tiniest bit unromantic?
Almost exactly 20 years ago, I embarked on my first year at university and fell wildly in love with one of my tutors.
He taught political philosophy (of course he did), and I would sit in his lectures thinking things like ‘Is there anything more attractive than a man who knows his Rousseau?’ (I was 19. We can all be unbearable at 19.)
He wore three-piece suits and polished shoes. He had a perfectly dry sense of humour. Towards the end of the year, I emailed him about having screwed up the date of our mock exam (all correspondence and essays were sent by email), in which I made a terrible and questionable joke about being blonde and essentially challenged him to a drink.
I’ll spare you the details because they’re not dignified 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 can’t quite remember because it was decades ago but they were very wonderful.
I was in love for the first time, having been raised on an almost exclusive diet of Jane Austen books and adaptations, and giddy with it.
If there was any imbalance it was on my side, because I went after him with all the grit and determination of a woman who’d recently released been from seven years at a single-sex boarding school.
Sophia says it’s probably a good idea that the University of Cambridge has banned personal relationships between staff and students
I sent him sunflowers early on in the belief that women could just as easily send men flowers as they could us; I burned him a James Blunt CD (cringe); we sent one another long, sweet emails that first summer while we were both travelling.
And he bought me a book of Edgar Allan Poe poetry. Finally I knew what it was like to have a person, my person, to go to sleep with and wake up beside. To message. To talk to. To hold hands with in a restaurant. To go away with at the weekends (until we went away for our final weekend, two years or so later in Amsterdam, where we broke up shortly before going around the Anne Frank museum, and I spent the entire tour walking through those cramped rooms audibly sobbing.
‘Jeez, that poor girl is really affected by this museum,’ I could see other tourists thinking).
He wasn’t teaching me by the time we started dating because I’d graduated to my second year and finished his course.
But we still kept it a secret on the basis that this was probably wise, ignoring one another in the library or the place where everyone went to get noodles at lunchtime.
This used to drive my friend Emily mad, because she knew I was dating a tutor but she didn’t know which one. ‘You just missed him,’ I’d tell her, if she and I were getting lunch together in the cafe and he came in to grab a coffee.
It was fun, and sexy, and the age gap wasn’t so pronounced. I tell people this story sometimes and they imagine a crusty old don, but I was 20 by the time we went on our first date, and he was 34.
He was, and remains, one of the kindest, brilliant and most thoughtful people I know, with a brain the size of the moon, and I learned a good deal from our relationship — communication skills, quite a bit about American football, and why not to break up with someone mere minutes before going round Anne Frank’s house.
He was certainly more grown-up and thoughtful than the men I could have dated who were my age.
Thanks to him, I also improved my music taste. Happiest of all, he’s stayed so close to my family (after our disastrous break-up weekend in Amsterdam) that, a few years ago, he married a subsequent girlfriend at my dad and stepmother’s home in Spain. How about that for a modern relationship?
I’m proud of it and fond of the memories. I look back at photos of that period now and my heart clenches a bit for how devotedly and uncomplicatedly I loved him, how easy it was compared to some of my subsequent relationships, when more baggage made things trickier, less trusting. When there was more angst.
So it’s probably good that Cambridge has changed the rules because I’m sure plenty of campus fumbles are quite different and the power imbalance more pronounced. I’m just saying it doesn’t always have to be the case, because it wasn’t that way for me.
