Dear Prudence,
What are the rules for dating an educator when you’re an adult? I’m a woman in my late-20s who is a non-traditional college student. Rather than go right into the undergraduate life, I moved around, and did a bunch of local and community work to figure out what I wanted before I got an inheritance that made going to school full time (with work study) a real possibility at a local state school. I’m not local, and the age difference between me and my scholastic peers makes socializing really rough. Meanwhile, the difference in life and work schedules makes the rest of my social calendar a nightmare, so I’ve felt pretty lonely.
I’ve been doing stuff over the summer on campus and met a guy who runs a competitive program on campus (a role adjacent to a speech coach, but with more administrative responsibility). In my role as a campus worker, I’ve helped him a couple times and we’ve had some good conversations. He checks basically every box for me: driven, smart, funny, nerdy, really tall, and kind. He’s also from out-of-town, which I think is something nice to bond over. I think there may be a little age gap, but not much of one. He doesn’t teach, but he does run a program geared toward undergraduates and has parallel roles as a teacher. So, my question is, can I tell him I’d be interested in getting a drink with him and maybe something more? I feel like if he were my professor that’d obviously be out of line, and if he were a dean in my college even more so, but if he were the manager of the campus bookstore there’d be no question of a problem. I can’t tell him though… Part of me thinks I can just avoid his program and anyone involved in it, but another part of me thinks that he has to be above any appearance of reproach and that’d be a tough situation to put either of us into? What are the rules here? What should I do?
—I’m Trying to Learn the Lines