It started out as a secret fling. I was an end-stage grad student in a department where he had recently been hired as a professor and although I was single and he was in the process of getting divorced and our different fields meant that we would never work together, we thought we should keep our relationship quiet.

The main reason was that we never thought it would last. Newly divorced, he was dating multiple people and, at 26, ten years younger than he, I wasn’t particularly mature and my relationship history as a commitment-phobe was spotty, at best. This thing was going nowhere and we both knew it.

So we spent a couple of months dodging around Bloomington, thinking we were keeping a secret that probably everyone knew about. When we finally went public, no one seemed particularly surprised. Or interested. As usual, one’s own affairs aren’t nearly as…