Below this post on student crushes, a reader named “P” describes her crush on one of her (married) professors. I’ll quote a section that has me thinking this morning:
I was interested in your advice not to talk about it with the professor. I had been considering doing so, although not now because there are still letters of recommendation for grad school to be written and I most certainly want to maintain a level of appropriateness until his defined role as a professor is done.
On the one hand your advice makes sense because he can’t really help me work through a crush of which he is the object. That’s not my goal though. My concern is that a large part of the reason I still think about him now is a curiosity as to whether he feels the same way…
Bold emphasis is mine.
I’m going to step beyond P’s specific issue with her professor, and reflect for a moment on the extraordinary desire so many of us have “to know”. P seems less interested in actually having an affair with her married prof than she is in finding out if her feelings for him are reciprocated. If you read through the comments below that post — and indeed through the comments on all the student crush posts — it seems clear that for many folks with crushes on their teachers, this curiosity to know whether or not the object of their desire feels something in return can be overwhelming.
I can’t think of a more tempting — and more disastrous — reason to begin any love affair than “curiosity.” When I was younger, I cloaked neediness and compulsiveness in the language of intellectual (or at least romantic) curiosity. Time and again, I pursued someone because I was desperately curious to know certain things: Could I “have” them? Did they “want” me as I “wanted” them? What would it be like to “be” (however briefly) with someone “like that”? Firmly committed to the lie that “experience is always the best teacher”, I attempted to justify some fairly unjustifiable behavior with the explanation that I had “an insatiable desire to know.” (This is a particularly common trait, I know, among academics — many of whom are notorious for petty affairs and infidelities. We exalt the pursuit of knowledge above all other virtues, and periodically find it all too easy to confuse the gratifying of our own ego with the acquisition of genuine understanding.)
I posted in February about flirtation. I wrote:
Flirtation, particularly when we are married or in committed relationship, brings us dangerously close to one of the most pernicious sins of all. No, I don’t mean adultery. I mean the sin of using another human being to soothe our own anxiety, to feed our ravenous ego. Sending out “mixed messages” that arouse interest, deliberately fishing about to see if we can get a little “stroking” — this is toxic, manipulative, adolescent.
This connects to the kind of curiosity to which P seems to refer. Our ego longs to know if we are wanted. Our ego promises us “I won’t take things too far; just let me find out!” The ego has a way of making its demands seem alternately reasonable and irresistable. It tells us that there’s no harm, surely, in taking steps to “know once and for all” whether that cute, taken teacher or student or colleague has an interest. Surely there’s no way any normal person ought to be expected to resist the temptation to “open the door, just a crack” in order to find out whether or not he or she is the object of another’s desire. “I don’t want to do anything”, the ego protests, “I just wanna know!”
I came to this realization later than many, but I’ve become convinced that wisdom and happiness in no small way correlate with a willingness to leave some doors closed, certain opportunities unpursued. One tool I use these days to measure my own spiritual growth is my own willingness to live contentedly with what I don’t know. Not only do I not need to know if a student has a crush on me or not, I’m called to make certain I take no steps in order to “find out.” (Like a lot of people’s, my ego, unrestrained, had all the subtlety of an untrained Great Dane; left unleashed, it would pant and slobber and race after promising scents that suggested the delicious gratification it craved. It knocked a lot of things over, periodically knocked people down, and left a big wet mess.)
Committing to “leaving doors unopened” is a spiritual and psychological discipline. Like any discipline, it gets easier with practice and the passage of time. When I was younger, I thought wisdom would come as the natural result of the relentless pursuit of every possible new experience. I believed that in love (or at least its physical aspect), any door unopened was a “crime against eros”. I didn’t see my behavior as compulsive, needy, and childish — I honestly thought it vaguely heroic. That was my sad foolishness, but it was a foolishness that hurt many others as well as myself. And it’s a foolishness I see alive and well in many of my students and, more troublingly, in my peers.
I have no right to judge those younger than myself who are only doing what I was doing at their same age. But I am wary of the lie that bitter experience is the only way to learn. Jesus told doubting Thomas, Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed. I’ll take the huge liberty of rephrasing it: Because of all the doors you recklessly opened, you have become wise; blessed are those who have become wise while leaving the doors closed.
I just want to say that even before reading this post, reading various blogs of yours had already begun to fundamentally change the way I want to interact with men. I’ve started realizing just how many of my relationships with men, especially older men, are sexualized in the sense that they flirt with me or in the sense that I seek sexual validation from them. And really, it’s not what I want. I want to have intellectual relationships. I find myself substituting sexual approval for intellectual approval though.
I can’t say how many of your posts I’ve read or which ones have impacted me the most but the aggregate of your ideas on feminism, sexuality, and professor/student relationships has changed the way I am viewing my personal relationships. I am now committed to ending my crush on this professor because I’ve realized that he is one of the few men who has never sexualized our relationship, making it obvious that he’s attracted to me for instance, and here I am seeking to make a perfectly fine intellectual relationship sexual by desiring to know what he thinks of me. It is really ridiculous.
So I’m going to do my part to stop flirting with said professor and with other guys in my life (besides my boyfriend of course!) in the hopes of having more fulfilling relationships with males and separating my own intellectual being from my sexual being. I think that if I stop flirting the said professor will too (and he may not even see his actions as flirtatious but they certainly egg me on). If he doesn’t I may have to subtly tell him to stop.
Anyway, I just want to thank you for having this blog where you speak so eloquently and so definitively about so many issues of great importance!
P
I think part of the wanting to know, at least in some cases, can also be the hope for some semblance of closure. I know that sometimes, flat out rejection is a lot faster than getting over something without knowing for sure that the other person doesn’t have feelings for you.
But in many cases, I agree that the whole act of admitting it is NOT to get over it, but to see if they feel the same way; if they are biting. And that, I think, we oftentimes need to avoid.
Katie, that’s a fair distinction, and one I accept.
P, as you know full well, we live in a culture which reminds young women relentlessly that their chief value is connected to their sexuality; it’s not an easy thing to unlearn. I wish you the best of luck as you do this important work.
Great post, Hugo. After all, if “it’s never going to happen,” then it doesn’t matter if the other person feels the same way or not; it only really matters if you’re hoping for more than idle fantasy.
(Not to sound as if I’m criticizing P., as that’s not my intent.)
Thanks for this thoughtful and wonderful post, Hugo.
You wrote: “I didn’t see my behavior as compulsive, needy, and childish — I honestly thought it vaguely heroic.”
May I ask what made you realize your behavior was not in fact heroic? I’ve been reading through your older posts, and I understand your spiritual awakening has a lot to do with it. Did anything else clue you into the truth, and how long did it take? I’m guessing the transformation didn’t just happen in a day, and that there were “one step forward, two steps back” days. I’m interested in knowing how you coped with this possibly gradual process. (If you’ve already posted about this, could you share the URL?)
P, hang in there. Know you’re not alone.
Well, Sydney, there’s my “wild oats” post last year:
http://hugoschwyzer.net/2006/09/28/a-lengthy-musing-about-sowing-wild-oats/
That’s a start.
Thanks, myth!
I think it’s often a mix of that closure Katie mentions - wanting them to not reciprocate plainly enough that you can get over them - and the contrary desire that, after all, maybe they’ll like you back. And it’s easy to kid yourself about how much of you honorably wants to move on, or how really sure you are that nothing will come of it. And in any case, one needs to accept not knowing.
I think practice in meditation kind of helps, here - just as you learn that in meditation you don’t have to fight the distracting “monkey mind” thoughts, but can just sort of let them float by, so, sometimes it helps, instead of fighting or trying to be done with a fantasy, to picture it as something like background music, or clouds, or an advertising jingle that’s gotten stuck in your mind - something that’s there in the background, but doesn’t oblige you to take any action.
“Because of all the doors you recklessly opened, you have become wise; blessed are those who have become wise while leaving the doors closed.” - HS
Those who become wise while leaving doors closed might be blessed, but they’ll also be very naive and will often wonder what they missed out on by leaving doors closed. In my experience, being naive and inexperienced with life has its drawbacks and from personal experience and the experience of friends raised in conservative religious environments, the naive and inexperienced live in a certain amount of envy at those who have experienced and feel like they have missed out in life. Then it all explodes in their faces at some point whether it be acting out in college, controlled acting out in one’s 20s after college or even mid-life crisis.
To illustrate, look at what I wrote here two years ago on my own blog:
“My college years were rather chaste, unfortunately. Part of me really thinks I should have done a lot more partying and screwing around when I was younger. Then I would have gotten it all out of my system and be more ready to settle down now. Now I feel like I need to make up for lost time in hopes of being ready to settle down by the time I am in my late 30s.” (From “Am I a Closet Slut?” 1/30/05)
I have read that sometimes men that get married young or youngish sometimes stray from their marriages in part because they feel they missed out on playing the field when they were young. They end up destroying their families in the process.
As with everything, there needs to be balance between gaining wisdom by opening strange doors when you don’t know what is behind them and leaving some doors closed because you have an idea what is behind them and opening it is way too dangerous.
Well, yes. Hugo wasn’t suggesting that doors ought never to be opened, so I’m not personally sure what the point of a “Golden Mean” post was.
I don’t know. I don’t think Hugo would advocate sowing one’s wild oats, though sometimes it happens and he wouldn’t condemn you for it.
I think people cheat or act out for all kinds of reasons, but mainly the reason that it feels good, and they justify it to themselves post hoc in all kinds of ways, like, “I never got to mess around when I was young!”
BTW I write this as an atheist hedonist, so take it for what it’s worth.
My grandparents are Southern Baptists (my grandfather is a minister, still practicing) and one of their church readers (those little magazines you use for adult Sunday school) had a whole article about the phenomenon of people who never significantly strayed (or never had an adult life prior to being “saved”) feeling inferior to people with fiery stories (like Hugo’s, perhaps) of all the terrible sins they committed before they were born again. The basic message was, it’s not “better” to have fallen, and you can be grateful that you never had to pass through those dark times. It didn’t address envy about untasted sins specifically - probably because that kind of reader just doesn’t address stuff like that - but I thought it was kind of interesting to read.
Treifalicious, did you read my “wild oats” post at all?
http://hugoschwyzer.net/2006/09/28/a-lengthy-musing-about-sowing-wild-oats/
Oh, dear. I read it only after I posted. I most certainly agree about the double standard thing (though I assume that women would sow their wild oats just as much as men nowadays) and I do understand how for some it would be addictive. In my (paltry) experience I have not seen it happen and I have had men who are players tell me that they are tired of being players and want to settle down (will they actually do it is a different story but it seems the desire is there). I have even seen a couple of guys actually do it, though maybe only in their 40s after they finally grew up, stopped engaging in the most self-destructive behavior of their youth (drugs, alcohol, promiscuity even while married with children) and decided to have a long term relationship with one woman without cheating. It would seem to me that men might be in more danger of never getting over the “wild oats” stage than women, through a combination of any biological factors that may or may not be at work and social conditioning that allows this behavior to go on. I also have heard of women having various partners for a stretch, especially after the dissolution of a long term relationship, and then returning to monogamy.
But then again, I have not seen so much of the seedier side of life and can’t fathom some of teh things other people tell me sometimes.
At the end of the day, I speak frommy own experience and the experience pf many of my friends who grew up in conservative and often religious environments who all complain that they feel like they missed out on experiences that might have been somewhat painful but ultimately would have been beneficial as learnng experiences. I think it is all an issue of degree. Religious Christians may have strictures on relations with the opposite sex in order to keep desires in check. However, one of my friends grew up as an Orthodox Jew in a neighborhood in Brooklyn well known for its Chasidic population and the separation between sexes maintained from early childhood onward competes with Fundamentalist Islam in its strictness. My friend told me that his brother ws nearly thrown out of his ultra-Orthodox religious school because teh principal saw him talking to a girl at a pizza shop after school. Can you even imagine for a minute living in an environment where you can be expelled from your school for simply speaking to a girl in public? And forget about things like school dances or proms - there are none. The normative Orthodox Jew (and thsi is rather mainstream) is NOT allowed to even touch members of the opposite sex and some won’t even shake hands with women in a business context (the Modern Orthodox will shake hands with women so that the man can get and keep jobs but that is considered a compromise) and there is no mixed dancing. At weddings, there will be a divider down the middle of the dance floor with men dancing on one side and women dancing on the other. And worship services have this same partition and so families never sit together during worship services - reason being that it supposedly helps people concentrate on prayer if they are not distracted by the charms of the opposite sex. Then when guys (as well as girls) from these schools reach their late teens and start getting set up on dates (which are by definition job interviews for marriage - in which it is not uncommon for the wedding to be 6 and even 3 months after that first date) they simply DO NOT KNOW HOW TO ACT around the opposite sex. You have here people who have had little social contact with members of the opposite sex outside their immediate families all of a sudden expected to create and maintain an intimate relationship with a member of the opposite sex.
Now my friend’s family was not as extreme (Modern Orthodox as opposed to Chasidic) and so when the Rabbi/school principal spoke to my friends father about his brother speaking to a girl at the pizza shop, the father stood up to the Rabbi/principal. But many parent’s don’t and cave in to the pressure, leading to a creeping extremism in ultra-Orthodox and even Modern Orthodox circles. And then we see the results all over the Upper West Side of Manhattan. After hearing stories like this I feel SO BLESSED that I did not grow up in this environment (I grew up in Catholic school - abstinence was encouraged but this was before the era of abstinence clubs and promise rings, but we had mixed sex school plays, dances and a prom) because I feel like I am wiser and have better social skills than my friend from Brooklyn who did and now at 35 occasionally makes all kinds of almost Borat-like social faux pas with women because of his lack of social and relationship experience.
“I have read that sometimes men that get married young or youngish sometimes stray from their marriages in part because they feel they missed out on playing the field when they were young. They end up destroying their families in the process.” (Trefalicious)
This was certainly the case in my own experience - my marriage blew up in a quarter-life crisis of sorts. Although my then-wife and I had no children to harm through divorce, it was still a difficult and upsetting decision for both of us. I was approaching 30 and - in my own self-assessment - felt that I was growing old and boring with relatively little wildness or experimentation in my youth. I believed that I had missed out on ‘typical’ college experiences, experimentation, and mistakes by focusing on schoolwork and dating a woman who was not interested in (and sometimes actively disapproving of) such ‘immature’ things. While I feel that I could have avoided a lot of pain by more accurately assessing what I really wanted at that time in my life, I am grateful that we didn’t have children, as the divorce would have been a lot more complicated and messy.
At this point, a few years later (and now over 30), I believe that I have a lot more life experience and mistakes under my belt; even so, I agree with the words of Trefalicious: “Now I feel like I need to make up for lost time in hopes of being ready to settle down by the time I am in my late 30s.”
This prospect does seem to be on my mind now and then: “It would seem to me that men might be in more danger of never getting over the “wild oats” stage than women, through a combination of any biological factors that may or may not be at work and social conditioning that allows this behavior to go on.” (Trefalicious again) Sometimes I feel that I am at risk of being a permanent ‘adultescent,’ never really moving beyond this stage. I have no particular wish to be a parent so the internal imperative to “shape up and behave as a role model” would is not terribly strong for me.
I’m not really sure what to recommend to others, but I would suggest that not getting married before the age of 30 or so is probably a good starting point. On the other hand, as Hugo suggests in the earlier post, aggressive oat sowing might set a trend or a habit that is difficult to break in the future. So I’m not sure what the ‘correct’ answer is, or if there is one answer that will work for all people.
Oh, there’s plenty of time to have dated a variety of people and still be married even before you’re 30. I got married at 27, and it’s not as if I was “sweet 27 and never been kissed.”
Lynn Gazis-Sax: >
In general, I agree. I think my suggestion above (heavily ‘disclaimered’) is probably more a reflection of my own experience (and advice to my past self) than anything truly universal. I’d say someone who had dated a few people, felt like that experience was “enough”, and honestly felt ready to commit to a marriage or long-term relationship should do fine at age 22, 25 or 40 or 50 - the key is being honest about what you really want so that you don’t face difficult contradictions later on.
“Those who become wise while leaving doors closed might be blessed, but they’ll also be very naive and will often wonder what they missed out on by leaving doors closed.”
Yes at times they may wish to have made the mistake themselves purely for having acquired knowledge in a more interesting way and out of curiosity; but someone that understands how to deal with life without having had first hand experience does not mean they are naive, it means they are empathetic and are strongly intuitive surely. How can one be wise and naive at the same time? Or in relation to this aspect of life?
Hugo, can you answer Cris’s question from your last blog on student crushes, where she describes her crush on a female professor with whom she has alot in common, and her desire to have a purely platonic relationship outside of school and the prof/student or mentor/mentee relationship (although she did confess to the occassional sexual feelings)? my situation being similar, I’m interested in your thoughts.
These blog entries have really helped explain the insane crush I have on one of my professors. He is an attractive, in his early forties, and extremely passionate about what he teaches. I’m a 24 year old student that was helplessly falling in love with him. He is so inspirational and moving that I couldn’t help but think that I was in love with him. I would find myself thinking about him all the time, to the point where I couldn’t sleep or eat. It was extremely unhealthy. The kicker is, is that I’m in a very loving, committed, long term relationship and I have never thought of infidelity until I took this person’s class. The feeling was so over-powering. After reading these entries I see what you are saying. I can see what I actually have a crush on. It’s the way I feel. It’s how inspired I feel after class. It’s the love for what he is teaching that I truly want to be a part of me. It is the subject matter and not the person that I’m falling in love with. I was so confused about my feelings because it is so out of character to who I am. I had never felt that intensely about anyone, but I now see it as the passion I have for what I am studying. Thank you so much for posting. This has truly helped me.