When I was an undergraduate at university I developed something of a ridiculous crush on one of my lecturers. Ridiculous because the lecturer in question was – to my mind – as old as Methuselah, had bad hair and worse clothes.

Despite his lack of physical charms I hung around him like a lovesick teenager, cornering him after class or in the coffee shop to solicit his opinions on a variety of topics that had nothing to do with the great canon of English literature.
I never did flirt with him, at least not in any obvious way, because I didn’t want him to think I was one of those students who believed that sexual favours could be exchanged for a few extra points on an exam paper. In fact I did the opposite of flirt – I disagreed with him, questioned his reasoning and challenged his conclusions, which to my surprise earned me his respect and in returned earned him my dogged devotion.
For the first time in my life I was dealing with a man who not only didn’t mind the fact that I disagreed with him about everything – except our mutual love of cricket – he positively encouraged it; and so, despite the bad haircut and loud nylon shirts he favoured I was smitten with him. One of the lasting lessons my professor taught me was that a good debate is the ultimate foreplay.
I love a man who loves to debate. They say that the most important sexual organ is the brain and I fully endorse that – thinking turns me on.
It is kind of odd though. I am not the kind of person who likes drama in my personal life and I can go from one year to the next without ever exchanging a cross word with a friend, lover or family member. I haven’t had an argument with my mother since I was thirteen, and in twenty years of friendship I’ve only ever had one bust up with my good friend, the lovely although domestically challenged Humphrey. It lasted all of three minutes when I nagged him to do his dishes (again) and he had a little strop.
With one dishonourable exception, in the last ten years or so my sexual and romantic relationships have tended to be relatively free of fights as well. Don’t get me wrong – treat me badly and you’ll free the full force of my wrath – but for the most part I prefer to surround myself with people who don’t annoy me and rouse the Sexton temper.
Possibly this is because I’m not particularly fond of make-up sex. It’s hard for me to feel erotically charged when I have eyes swollen from crying or am keyed up with anger. Personally I reckon that if you need to engage in full-on emotional warfare in order to get juiced up, you’re probably in the wrong relationship. I am, of course, prepared to concede that perhaps that’s just me and am willing to discuss the matter heatedly with you at a time and place that suits us both.
But a debate, well, that’s a completely different story. Give me a man who can happily debate with me for hours and I’ll want to rip his clothes off and do unspeakable things to him. Perhaps just to shut him up…
While my lecturer was most definitely out-of-bounds, my first year at university provided me with a more appropriate sparring partner. I met him through mutual friends on the lawn outside the library. I’d like to say that the first thing I noticed about him was his intellectual prowess, but that would be a lie – it was his nicely defined abs. He was doing a handstand at the time and his shirt had fallen over his head giving me an eyeful, and hell yes, I’m as shallow as the next girl from time to time.
It took all of one date to discover that Timothy and myself had absolutely nothing in common. He was sporty, I was bookish; he believed in capitalism, I was a socialist; he liked getting his full eight hours of beauty sleep, I loved clubbing; he was a committed Christian of the re-born ilk and I was a lapsed Catholic; he didn’t believe in sex before marriage, I didn’t believe in marriage; hell, we didn’t even like most of the same books, films or music.
Despite all this, we had a great time together spending hours arguing over politics, economics, current affairs or music before heading back to my student commune for some passionate, semi-naked making out. Years later, we’re still friends and we still disagree about almost everything.
The secret to a good debate is not taking disagreement personally, and the problem is that so many people do. Hold a different opinion and some people believe that you are criticising them.
A while back I dated a man who, as I subsequently discovered, was the kind of bloke who would throw a hissy fit if I had the impertinence to disagree with him. In the end it didn’t matter that he knew his way around a clitoris and was an excellent lover, I found his attitude boorish and boring and my desire to have sex with him disappeared in a puff of his indignant anger.
I wouldn’t want to bed down with a racist, sexist or homophobe but other than that, everything else is open to debate. The problem, I’ll admit, is my own. Given half a chance I’ll be up on my soapbox declaiming about something: globalisation, industrial farming, conflict diamonds, NAMA, Brian Cowen, Pope Benedict, Lady GaGa, the Man Booker, the Mercury Prize, feminism, free trade and of course, sex. And just as I want a man to match me in sexual enthusiasm, I want him to be able to keep up his side of the argument.
I don’t care if my lover agrees with me or not, because I’m not so narcissistic that I want to have sex with a carbon copy of myself – I want him to be his own man, with his own opinions. Viva la différence.
In my opinion (and this is open to debate) the best lovers are those who make you think as well as come. They are the ones that don’t bore you after a few weeks, the ones whose company is always interesting, who have substance to offer, who teach you something and who you’ll remember the most fondly as the years go by.
Finding this is, of course, the tricky bit. But if you have been accepted into third-level education this year, college or university is an excellent place to start. Institutes of higher education are positively crawling with interesting, intelligent and opinionated people, most of them single and most of them looking to learn a little more than what’s delineated on their course schedules.
University is a wonderful time to open your mind to new ideas, new experiences, new people and new sexual experiences. Just don’t drink too much or have unsafe sex. That’s not an opinion – that’s just plain old common sense. Have a great year!