Thursday, May 29, 2008

Academic courtship*

I feel like I just asked someone to please be my boyfriend. My academic boyfriend, I mean. And the person is female. But she said yes!

Let me back up a sec. The first thing you need to know is that I didn't have close academic friends in grad school. I also never had a reading group or a writing group, and my advisor and I only met once or twice a semester. So for six years--or almost my entire academic career--the person who read and re-read everything I wrote, and who heard my every idea and talked me through every problem, was my ex.

After we broke up last summer, I was virtually unable to write. I felt I didn't know how to write without hashing through the day's progress with him, and he was also too intimately associated with everything I was working on. I got over my paralysis, in part because I had deadlines to meet and in part because the awesome Evey immediately offered her time and her feedback to help me meet the first one. I knew, though--and I'd known even when my ex and I were still together--that I needed to develop stronger intellectual relationships with more people in my field.

I now have quite a lot of academic friends, and I've vaguely talked about exchanging work with some of them. But yesterday I had dinner with one--a relatively new friend, in my field--and I asked her out. Uh, I mean: I asked her if she'd be willing to be a regular reader of my stuff. And she said yes. . . as long as I'd do the same for her.

Eeeee!

I can't tell you how happy this makes me.


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*h/t Neo.

6 comments:

Renaissance Girl said...

Nice! And I say that as one who labors in monkish solitude, and envies what I hope will be a long-term academic love affair...

medieval woman said...

Congrats on your new academic squeeze! It feels good, huh? The flowers smell nicer; the sun shines brighter...*sigh*

K said...

Cool. We all need someone like that.

What Now? said...

Great news! And I'll admit that I'm jealous of your new academic romance. I did have writing groups and editing partners and all the rest of it in grad school, and I have missed it so much since then. I've tried recreating those relationships in other ways, and none of them has been True Love. So yay for you for asking out your new Academic Main Squeeze!

Horace said...

As someone who's had a tiny bit of trouble doing just this sort of peer-level networking, I'd love to hear more about the sorts of things you do to even meet the kind of people you'd want to develop academic crushes on.

Doctor Cleveland said...

Happy days, Flavia! And not long-distance, either! Enjoy!