One upon a time, I was in love with my tutor.

Or at least, as in love as I knew how to be.

How I Do It: Meet the mum-of-two who has sex all day, every day

I had the kind of feelings that you can only really have when you’re in your teens – obsessive, thinking about them all the time, lying awake at night feeling sad about the fact that you’ll probably never be together. Something that’s easy to confuse with love.


Basically, I was the kind of full-on Woody Allen cliche that would make film critics reach for the words ‘badly drawn’ and ‘unrealistic’ and it would have taken about six words to get me on his desk. And while I’d have been on that desk willingly, consentingly, it still wouldn’t have been right.



I have no doubt that he knew how I felt about him, and I’m just as sure that there was an element of reciprocation.

After all, I was pretty and leggy and I thought that everything he said was the purest elixir of genius.

We were quite close. I’d hang out in his office, asking questions that I thought made me sound incisive, challenging his theories because that’s what girls in books did.

Occasionally, during these times, spent together, I’d stray into personal territory, talking about boyfriends and dating and all the things that come with being a teenager.

He would smile indulgently, occasionally give me a little advice, and then steer things back on to an academic topic. Every time we lasted a little bit longer in the realm of the real word I would feel that I’d won something. But he was still completely in control. He knew exactly how we could go before a line was crossed, and he walked it carefully.

Yes, we were closer than most students, but he was entirely, perfectly above board. And I am hugely grateful for that.

It’s only now, years later, that I can see how wrong it would have been if he had responded to any of my long, lingering gazes with anything other than a gentle flirt and a reminder that we had Chaucer to get through. Not all academic staff share that kind of integrity.

Hugo Schwyzer, a lecturer, wrote an essay titled ‘Why I swore off sleeping with students for 10 years, and why I went back.’

In his essay, Schwyzer details how he was dumped by a student (I can only assume this is an attempt to paint himself as a victim) and swore of sleeping with the young women he teaches, until ten years later when he was sober, he started again.

There are a lot of questionable things about Schwyzer’s essay, but the most worrying part of it is that he seems to thinks by reiterating that the affairs were consensual he has freed himself of any moral wrongdoing.

Schwyzer seems to truly believe that consensual sex between a student and a teacher is acceptable. He is wrong.

It doesn’t matter that it was consenting. It doesn’t matter that it was fun, or sexy. It doesn’t matter what the circumstances were. There is no good reason for a professor to sleep with his student. Even if she, like I did, really wants it.

In doing so, a teacher prioirtises their desire to have sex with someone young and attractive over that student’s right to an education.

There is a very real, pure joy that comes from being in love with someone who isn’t going to sleep with you. It’s a kind of safe place. It lets you experience an intensity of feeling and a passion for another person, without any of the risk that comes from entering into a real relationship.



Falling in love with a teacher or a lecture is a type of hero worship, especially when you’re an academic person who hasn’t dated people who challenge them before. A good teacher will inspire you, and make you believe in yourself. There is something deeply wrong about taking that inspiration and belief and the muddying it with sex.

It teaches the student that they weren’t interesting enough academically, that sex is their real value. It says that yes, you’re conversationally fine but your real value is in opening your legs.

When we talk about young women as being ‘taken advantage of’ we have to be careful. Sometimes those words do more harm than good, stripping young women of their of their power, patronising them. But in this case, I think it’s an unavoidable phrase.

I would have told you, aged eighteen, that I was an adult, that I was smart. That I didn’t need to be told what I could and couldn’t do, and that if I wanted to f*ck a man a decade, or several decades, my senior then that was my choice.

In the end, I did spend most of my early twenties sleeping with someone old enough to be my father, and I have reservations about how appropriate that was.

But the difference was, the man I ended up with wasn’t in a position of authority. I might have had him on a pedestal, but I put him there. He wasn’t using the platform given to him by an educational establishment to make himself sexually attractive.


So thank you, to the man who didn’t sleep with be despite having every single opportunity to. However much I wanted it at the time, if it had happened it would have changed my academic experience.

It would have made me see myself as sexual, rather than clever. And it would have made my hero, the man who I worshipped for his intellect, into a real person. It’s very hard to see someone as the foremost authority on Chekhov when you’ve seen their come face.

There are only so many people over the course of our lives who shape our intellects and our passions for learning, and those people should not under any circumstance be allowed to parlay that power into getting laid – no matter how much the student in question might want it.

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