Poor woman's rich friend has been anonymously giving her financial help. Sweet or controlling?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Ideally never, and certainly not while he’s still employed at the university. I don’t know if his behavior could endanger his retirement benefits at this point, but if he’s found to have violated the sexual harassment policy he could be denied emeritus status and be permanently barred from campus. That would be in addition to the possibility of a lawsuit against him and disciplinary or legal action against his wife.

I get that you’re more interested in discussing Edward’s behavior, but I think you’re fighting your own hypothetical here. You’ve made a point of emphasizing the damage to Lily’s reputation and the character you’ve portrayed as directly and deliberately causing this damage isn’t Edward. It was her advisor. Worse still, he (unlike Edward) is in a position of authority over Lily and has almost certainly violated university policy and his professional code of ethics. While Edward was arguably being dishonest or manipulative, he could not reasonably have foreseen that Lily’s advisor would learn who was paying for her tuition, much less that the professor would react to this knowledge in a totally inappropriate and unprofessional manner.

42

I’m not fighting my own hypo, Lamia. I just don’t care about the professor, and neither, I daresay, would Lily. She’s about to graduate; he’s about to retire. She’s done with him, just as I was done with all my professors but one after I left school. Edward by contrast is a friend of long standing, newly a lover, whom she is in love with but now is not sure she should trust.

Also, there’s nothing to say that Lily isn’t planning legal action against the professor, just as there’s nothing to say Ed hasn’t been schtupping supermodels all this time and thus didn’t mind not getting any from a woman of girl-next-door cuteness he liked for multiple other reasons. None of that matters to the question of the thread: Is Ed a generous mensch whom Lily should stay with, or a manipulative jerkwad she see should kick to the curb?

43

Waitaminute, is Lily Alyson Hannigan? Or, if not, can I imagine she looks like Alyson Hannigan?

If so, as long as Edward isn’t actually Robert Pattinson, it would be really difficult to blame him for being smitten enough to behave the way he did…

44

How am I supposed to police your imagination?

Anyway, I named her Lily because I was looking at a picture of lillies when I came up with the name. I don’t imagine her as being as cute as a 20something Hannigan was.

45

Well, you wrote two posts stressing “the damage to Lily’s reputation”, the “subtle but grave consequences” this may have for her in the future, and how humiliating it was for Lily when her advisor “basically called Lily a whore to her face, and I doubt he’s unique in that assessment.” That’s in addition to saying in the OP that Lily was disturbed by the professor’s insults. So yeah, you’re fighting your own hypothetical by saying now that Lily doesn’t care about her professor insulting her to her face and spreading false, harmful gossip about her behind her back. The professor is so clearly the villain in this situation that his actions far overshadow anything Edward did.

46

I’d say Eds gone a long way out of his way not to be manipulative by trying hard to hide where the money comes from, and making nothing contingent on Lilys doing anything at all.

The professor, however, is very far out of line. First off, since he has to explain where the scholarship comes from, clearly any charge that Lily slept her way to it is false, and he must know that.

How did the professor know about where Lily tuition comes from? Is he in the financial department? Does he have some kind of superuser access to the students records? Even that would not yield any information of the scholarships source, beyond which legal firm was holding it. He’d clearly have to do more digging than that.

Beyond that, how many people have their fiancée, boyfriend, husband, etc pay their tuition? It can hardly be an uncommon thing, and I struggle to see how anyone thinks this will affect her reputation.

Is the professor one of those weird physics professors who has built a time machine which got him there from the 1930s? Because it is the last time I can imagine people gave a flying fuck if someone’s lover paid their tuition.

The professor is clearly on thin ice both legally and off the record. Ed is clearly powerful and subtle enough that an offhand comment to the faculty would see the professors comfortable retirement seriously imperilled.

And frankly…the Professors sour-grapes sexual innuendo combined with his deep knowledge of stuff he has to have done a lot of illegal digging to find out, means if I was Lily, I’d certainly never be alone with him again.

Considered as a story though, it is not inconsistent with Lilys history and home environment if she lashes out at Ed and tries to appease her sexual predator professor.

47

I think this:

Fits in pretty well with this:

Fact is, I’m not even actually in love with Edward, nor is Lamia, and both of us are directing our anger pretty squarely at not-Edward. I think that’s pretty typical, and even more likely when you’re actually in a relationship with someone. To keep a relationship intact, many people will direct their anger towards a third party (even when that’s actually misdirected, as in the case of an infidelity with an ignorant third.)

I can see where people would blame Edward, but were Lily me, I wouldn’t. And you’d probably take me out to coffee and gently explain to me all the reasons why I should be blaming Edward, and I’d make all sorts of excuses for why you didn’t really understand him, and how it was all the evil professor’s fault. And you’d sigh, and realize that people in love are stoopid and order another half caf mocha venti and we’d change the subject to something safer like the refuge crisis or gun control.

48

Edward is certainly to blame for not being up-front with Lily, but he’s not to blame for the professor’s actions. The professor’s behavior is so far out of line, and frankly so implausible, that Edward couldn’t have guessed that such a thing would happen as a consequence of him paying Lily’s tuition.

…Unless Edward’s ex-wife was right, and he’s a very subtle but very controlling asshole.

If somehow, against all plausibility, Edward managed to set this whole thing up then he’s an evil genius. Lily now knows that Edward’s generosity provided for her education BUT her degree won’t allow her financial independence since this is apparently an alternate world with Victorian morals still in effect and her reputation has been ruined, the incredibly inappropriate behavior of the professor distracts Lily from Edward’s questionable honesty, and now Edward gets to overtly play the hero by using his money and legal skills to help Lily with her sexual harassment case.

“Oh Edward, what would I ever do without you?”

49

I don’t think I’ve ever imputed Victorian morals to the situation. But I do day and think that most persons would be highly offended by the accusation that they’d slept their way to prosperity. In Lily’s case it might be worse, as she mistrusts her judgment about romance. I expect that she choose to be non-platonic with Edward because he so long acted like a mensch, and finding that he had been … obfuscating … for so long would make her feel like a fool.

Oh, and when I say that Lily doesn’t care about the professor, I mean that the relationship is not important to her. It was all but over with anyway, between her graduating and him retiring. And the profo, though unfortunately and undoubtedly a creep, did provide her with information she had a right to know about.

50

Stupid autocorrect. That should be I do SAY, not day.

51

Well…I must respectfully disagree there. The whole notion that having her tuition paid by her rich partner is somehow a negative…that it’ll affect her reputation and her prospects…that’s pretty fucking Victorian.

People don’t really care who pays your tuition.

People really don’t care who paid your tuition.

Thats so important I had to write it twice. No-one is going to give a shit if her boyfriend/girlfriend/fiancée/husband/wife paid her tuition. It isn’t going to affect her prospects or career in any way. This is not the 19th century.

She should though, because he has no legal way to have than information, and it would take quite a bit of illegal effort to acquire it. Combined with his clearly deviant ideas about sexual morality and interest in her sex life…well, he has already committed enough crimes out of interest for her sex life to go to jail.

This is obviously someone to either report to the police* right now!* or steer well clear of.

52

By

53

I grew up in an abusive household and a long line of dysfunctional families. My mother and most of her four sisters married abusive guys, serial cheaters or other winners and the cycle of dysfunctionality repeated in their generation.

I’m fortunate to have not married some of the women I was in relationships with; they were clearly crazy, but I couldn’t see it at the time. I look back and wonder just what the hell I was thinking, but of course, I wasn’t. You don’t have that clarity.

It’s all part of the horrible cycle of fucked up families producing people who don’t have the emotional tools to deal with life and find dysfunctional people to pair up with.

From the information give, it’s impossible to know where to place Edward on the charts. He’s uber-rich, which has screwed up more than one person in the world. His exwife thinks he’s controlling, but is it Sleeping with the Enemy controlling?

With really screwed up people, you often can’t tell until you’re already in a relationship with them. They can change like night and day.

For Lily, she’s obviously got a terrible amount of baggage, and her first marriage amply demonstrates that it’s a reoccurring problem. Going back for more after four trips to the ER shows that she’s dysfunctional as well. Sure, she finally left him, but this level of problems doesn’t fade away on its own.

I can only imagine her pain right now. Any self confidence she was developing from gaining a scholarship and selling painting has just been crushed. Likewise, her decision to allow herself to love Edward, only to be proven that there were again hidden secrets is devastating.

People who already have healthy egos and functional emotional responses may have difficulty appreciating the damage this can do. This may be the reason that Edward doesn’t deserve to be shot. He simply would not know what he did.

For those who say that her reputation doesn’t matter and that no one cares how she got her scholarship, that’s true. But it matters to her, and much more so than it would to someone sans baggage.

Some of the details just send chills up my spine. It was not just one or two paintings, it was tons. That has got to make her question her self worth. It was not just one abusive ex, it was two and more than one occasion. She’s got problems.

There are never pat answers to complicated issues in life. Counseling with a damn good therapist would be a start.

54

Of course they’d be offended. That’s part of why it was such an inappropriate thing for the professor to say. But someone with contemporary values would not conclude that if a wealthy philanthropist known for his pro-bono legal work is paying for a female friend’s college education then it must be because she’s prostituting herself to him – especially since she didn’t even know he was her benefactor. That this one elderly professor is a creep with antiquated views about women is perhaps believable, but if a rumor about a single, adult woman possibly having sex with a single, adult man is enough to cause lasting harm to Lily’s professional reputation then that’s (thankfully) not the world I live in.

If she’s planning to start a career or go to grad school then she’s going to need letters of recommendation or references. It would be common to ask one’s academic advisor to do this, and if not them then another professor from one’s major. But thanks to Prof. Perv, Lily presumably would not be comfortable asking any of her instructors to serve as a reference.

Of course, Edward could probably help her out there too. He must know all kinds of important people. So again, the question for me is whether Edward is (at worst) a garden variety manipulator who never could have predicted the professor’s behavior or if he’s some sort of comic book evil genius capable of orchestrating the whole thing to make Lily dependent upon him.

55

I know Skald doesn’t want to hear it, but I’m going to say it anyway. The sequence of events that had to happen for Lily to even find out about Edward’s secret is so ridiculous that it really does shift all the blame to the pervy Prof. If something like that could happen, how much influence over the situation could Edward have actually had?

56

Yeah, that’s why I’m wondering if we’re dealing with a kind of comic book world here. If we’re meant to believe it’s possible that Edward is an evil genius whose dastardly (and extremely complicated) scheme has worked out just the way he wanted it to then sure, he’s bad news.

Realistically speaking though, Edward never could have guessed that Lily’s advisor would behave in such an unlikely and inappropriate manner. Any damage to her reputation is completely the professor’s fault.

57

Oh I’m sure you know plenty and just keep it in your own circle of academics who sit around sipping wine and laughing at your students.

Students talk. They share. They write papers revealing intimate parts of their lives. You know alot of things.

It would certainly help if college was not so damn expensive or their were more scholarships offered.

58

Where the fuck is this coming from?

59

I don’t quite think it is a comic-book world. I think you hit the nail on the head when you said “Victorian”. To me, this sounds like the plot of some story from between the world wars. When college faculty was a small insular community who grew up in the late 1800s, and did indeed have Victorian morals.

Maybe some college that hasn’t been admitting women for long, and fears their feminine wiles will lead to chaos.

You do know that porn does not give a realistic picture of what college is like, right?

60

Don’t harsh my collegiate-porn buzz, man.