There many kinds of real relationships. I think we sometimes get stuck in the mode that relationship must be a lover or best friend, but really, any interaction with others is a relationship of some sort. I have a working relationship with my co-workers, and some of them go further into a friendly relationship as we've known each other so long and care about each other more in just the work context. I teach and have a teacher/student relationship with my students that is certainly real. It isn't a friendship, but it is a close learning relationship where we care, explore, learn, joke around, and support in the context of the school and classroom.

I find my relationship with my therapist and my pdoc to be quite real, but quite unique to my mental health/healing aspect of life. Again, they aren't my friends and that wouldn't be appropriate, but they certainly know me quite intimately in ways than no actual friend or coworker or family member knows me.

Relationships are real within the context that they live. It is when we try to pull a relationship out of its natural context into a different and inappropriate context that problems arise.