At Oxford, desire often wears a gown. It speaks in footnotes, engages in debates in the smoking area, and sends you into an existential crisis because it used ‘dialectical’ correctly in conversation. There is a peculiar sort of longing here, less carnal than cerebral, but just as consuming. We do not so much fall in love as fall into analysis.
We call it admiration to stay respectable. But admiration at Oxford is really lust with better vocabulary. It is the fantasy of intellectual intimacy, the longing to be understood – or at least impressed – by someone whose mind reflects our own best version back at us. Tutors, supervisors, and the effortlessly-incisive postgraduate who dismantles arguments for pleasure all feel like mirrors reflecting our ambition and desire for understanding. It is this fantasy of intellectual intimacy, rather than romance, that keeps us engaged. Psychoanalysis might call it projection; the University calls it ambition. Either way, the heart writes essays it pretends are about Barthes.
The institution itself is built on sublimation, desire transformed into productivity. We fall for brilliance, then hide it under theory. The tutorial becomes the socially acceptable form of seduction: two people in a small room, locked in a battle of wits and repressed feeling. Oxford trains us to turn passion into prose and to transmute emotion into evidence. The result is an erotic life of the mind, more durable than love and far safer.
Rules against staff-student relationships try to sanitise this dynamic, but prohibition only sharpens the fantasy. Such intellectual attachments remain alive precisely because they must stay purely theoretical. Unattainable figures of authority become mirrors for desire: no mess, no heartbreak, just perpetual curiosity disguised as aspiration.
Beyond people, Oxford itself functions as a collective fantasy: the dream of being chosen, exceptional, clever enough to belong. But fantasies are brittle. You arrive and discover that everyone else is just as anxious, and you compensate with performance. You become the idea of an Oxford student, burnt-out but brilliant, ironic about your own collapse. The late-night library photo, the ball ticket you cannot afford, the caption about despair and deadlines: it is all choreography. We aestheticise exhaustion because it feels like evidence of importance. Achievement itself becomes a form of performance, a carefully curated exterior, and failure, paradoxically, acquires its own glamour.
Oxford often romanticises falling short: the tortured genius who misses tutorials because he is thinking too deeply, the student who leaves because university cannot contain her ambition. These moments of underachievement become cultural currency, a way to desire without obligation. Falling short is both spectacle and freedom, a mirror for what we cannot quite attain.
Oxford thrives on longing. You do not come here to be satisfied; you come to be almost satisfied forever, chasing the next grade, the next recognition, the next person who might finally understand you. In a generation obsessed with metrics, likes, and curated intellect, Oxford amplifies the same desire to be exceptional. Desire becomes the energy that keeps this world turning.
Perhaps that is why we all look slightly haunted by fifth week, not because we are overworked, but because we are over-imagining. Longing is safer than possession, and impossibility has its own clarity. In a culture obsessed with achievement and perception, ignorance – especially of what we truly want – may be the only honest thing left.
