The Friend Pursues Romantic Relationships with Students and Former Students

The Friend Pursues Romantic Relationships with Students and Former Students describes a recurring feature of the Friend’s life as a teacher: over a period of years, he entered romantic relationships with students and former students, while maintaining that such relationships were not inherently wrong. The episodes bring his defense of erotic possibility in teaching into conflict with questions of judgment, professional responsibility, and unequal authority. The account follows that conflict from his stated principles, through a formal complaint and ignored warning, to a later relationship that reveals how little his desire is returned.

The Friend’s View of Teaching

The Friend sees no wrong in pursuing students or former students. His defense rests partly on the absence of a rule forbidding the relationships: in his view, the lack of a prohibition is as it should be. He also argues that eroticism belongs to teaching, rather than being an irrelevant or shameful intrusion into it. To support that position, he directs the Narrator to read George Steiner and Lessons of the Masters. The Narrator does so and finds an argument that erotic feeling, whether imagined or enacted, is interwoven with teaching, and that attention to sexual harassment has trivialized this underlying fact.

The Friend’s appeal to intellectual authority does not settle the ethical question. The account places his broad claim about the classroom beside particular relationships in which he is the teacher and the women are, or have been, his students. The Narrator recalls having once felt thrilled when the Friend called her dear, and acknowledges the hypocrisy implicit in criticizing him while remembering that response. The admission complicates the Narrator’s position, but it does not erase the difference between private excitement and the Friend’s conduct toward students. The Friend also points out that in some instances students initiated the seduction. That possibility forms part of his defense, but does not resolve the concern about propriety and judgment that later becomes explicit.

Complaint and Warning

One early case involved a foreign student who rebuffed the Friend’s advances and later accused him of retaliating by awarding her an A minus instead of the A she believed she deserved. An investigating committee found that she had a pattern of challenging grades, and concluded that the A minus was, if anything, suspiciously generous. The inquiry therefore did not substantiate the specific allegation that the Friend had punished her through grading.

That finding did not amount to approval of his conduct. Although romantic relationships between teachers and students were not officially forbidden, the committee judged his behavior improper and morally unsound, and said it could not be tolerated. The result was a warning rather than a formal rule change: the institution recognized a problem of professional judgment even without an explicit ban. The Friend ignored the warning and, for a time, got away with doing so. The distinction matters to the episode: a complaint about one grade was investigated on its own merits, while the broader issue of his relationships remained a question of conduct and responsibility.

Desire and the Later Relationship

The account returns to the pattern when the Friend has just turned fifty. At a bar, he arrives already tipsy, becomes thoroughly drunk, and talks at length about women. The Narrator wishes he would stop, not because of jealousy, but because she feels embarrassed for him. She believes she has already made peace with this aspect of his life; what she cannot bear is seeing him expose a wound that, in her view, he knows she cannot mend. The scene shows the Narrator as both a witness to his vulnerability and someone who resents being made to witness it.

The younger woman at the center of this later episode is nineteen and a half. The Narrator’s account distinguishes what the Friend can endure from what he cannot: he can bear that the woman does not love him, and may even prefer that distance, but he cannot bear that she does not want him. At times she feigns desire, without conviction; more often, she does not bother. The Narrator understands that sex is not what draws the woman to the Friend, and that her own sexual interest lies elsewhere. This mismatch gives the relationship its defining tension: the Friend is intensely invested, while the younger woman’s interest in him is limited.

The Narrator describes this as part of an established pattern. The young women are willing to have relationships with the Friend but do not share the desire that drives him toward them. Instead, the Narrator attributes their interest to narcissism and to the excitement of bringing an older man in a position of authority to his knees. This is the Narrator’s interpretation of their motives, not an independently confirmed account of the women’s intentions. Its sharp contrast with the Friend’s emotional dependence nevertheless clarifies the imbalance the episode emphasizes: authority does not secure affection, and a relationship that he experiences as consuming may mean something quite different to the person he pursues.

Risk, Age, and Consequence

The Narrator recalls that the Friend predicted that continuing to teach would sooner or later bring her to grief. The Narrator feared the same outcome. The Friend is described among several men known to the Narrator who risked careers, livelihoods, marriages, and everything else through reckless sexual behavior. The account does not report a specific later professional or marital consequence for the Friend; its emphasis is on the danger he knowingly approached and the uncertainty surrounding how much his third wife knew or cared.

Change comes only after years, and the Narrator links it to age. That conclusion resists the idea that an argument or warning alone altered the Friend’s behavior: the committee’s reprimand had not stopped him, and he ignored it. The later relationship, with its stark difference between his desire and the woman’s, makes the pattern’s costs visible without supplying a neat resolution. The episodes show the Friend defending erotic possibility in teaching while repeatedly confronting the consequences of authority, desire, and poor judgment; the account leaves the extent of those consequences, and the extent of change, deliberately limited to what the Narrator can attest.