Tam Lin, love at college
As far as she could tell, studying at Blackstock was a full-time job, and nourishing a beginning love affair was a job and a half. …. Was it possible that when people objected to coeducational colleges, it was this sort of problem, and not an impertinent and disgusting desire to police other people’s morals, that really moved them? …. Whether this affair was ever consummated or not, it required patience, attention, energy, wit, and generosity.
Tam Lin, Pamela Dean
Turning this idea the other way around, does one (at least a heterosexual one) attend a single-sex college to reduce the likelihood of having to spend this kind of time and energy? Nurturing friendships does also take patience, attention, etc., but friendships are not usually as delicate, nor as likely to consume one’s whole mind.
I was at Wellesley at the same time that Janet was at Blackstock, having a similar experience, minus the love affairs (also, all of my classics professors were merely mortal). My roommate had a long-distance relationship with her high-school sweetheart, but that did not involve the daily attention and strategizing that Janet is thinking about. As Harriet Vane says in Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night, “You can run after young men any time-God knows the world’s full of them. But to waste three years which are unlike anything else in one’s lifetime is ridiculous.” But Gaudy Night takes place in the 1930s, and Tam Lin in the 1970s. Do these ideas still have any validity? Did they ever?
Tam Lin, Pamela Dean
Turning this idea the other way around, does one (at least a heterosexual one) attend a single-sex college to reduce the likelihood of having to spend this kind of time and energy? Nurturing friendships does also take patience, attention, etc., but friendships are not usually as delicate, nor as likely to consume one’s whole mind.
I was at Wellesley at the same time that Janet was at Blackstock, having a similar experience, minus the love affairs (also, all of my classics professors were merely mortal). My roommate had a long-distance relationship with her high-school sweetheart, but that did not involve the daily attention and strategizing that Janet is thinking about. As Harriet Vane says in Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night, “You can run after young men any time-God knows the world’s full of them. But to waste three years which are unlike anything else in one’s lifetime is ridiculous.” But Gaudy Night takes place in the 1930s, and Tam Lin in the 1970s. Do these ideas still have any validity? Did they ever?