Perils and pitfulls of academic puppy love

The fall of my freshman year, I made the mistake my mother had warned me against. I got involved with an older man. I saw him a few times a week, talked about him endlessly and did everything he asked of me. Of course, "involved" might be too strong a word, especially since he had the same relationship with about 25 other undergraduates, mostly male: he was my professor. I never worked up the nerve to go to his office hours, for fear I'd be too embarrassed to speak at all — and because my problem set grades were far from the perfection I imagined he'd attained effortlessly in his own undergraduate years.

I liked him so much I spent the first few weeks of the spring sitting in on another class he was teaching, though I didn't take it (and it was a 10 a.m. MWF class, mind you). That eventually dropped off, mainly because I wasn't doing so hot in my other classes, but the spirit of the obsession remained. It probably reached its most embarrassing peak when my friend — slightly enamored herself — Googled him on my computer only to discover I'd done it so many times myself that every link on the first three results pages had already been visited. She did me one better though and set his face as my background in some way I couldn't figure out how to undo. This caused my father a certain amount of alarm when I went home for the summer and he was installing some software on my laptop. "Who is that man?" he asked.

At the end of my freshman year, I worked up the courage to bake my love some cookies, but I had someone else deliver them. In return, he autographed my textbook and wrote, "Thanks for the cookies." That just about made my life.

Perhaps this anecdote is not the best way to make my point. I'd like to say it might have been better had I "gone for it." Either I would have found out that he wasn't so wonderful and eliminated the impossible ideal by which I now measure every man or I would have wound up with one of the best looking, most intelligent and charming men on the face of the planet. Sounds like a win-win proposition other than the pathetic disillusionment or home-wrecking history I would have acquired in either case, respectively.

I told my mother I couldn't quite figure out where to go with this column using that example, and she said the lesson could be that "Maybe 18-year-olds don't know what they want." Maybe, but neither do most 21-year-olds, so I can hardly offer encouragement to my non-senior readers.

I think the lesson here is that situations are complex. There really isn't such a thing as a win-win situation. Education is all about understanding complexity, so maybe my four year perspective is helping me understand that my crush on this professor was partially indulged just because it amused my friends and that trying to be a faux Marxist isn't really compatible with fawning over an Eton accent.

And that brings me to the end of this column without a lesson or controversial statement of any kind to hammer home in some sweeping generalization impossible to justify in 10,000 words or less. I guess the lesson is that people are strange, and it's better to wear your heart on your sleeve than on your ass. Hurrah Princeton. Aileen Nielsen is an anthropology major from Las Vegas, Nev. She can be reached at anielsen@princeton.edu.