This is a hard subject. I am a teacher as well, and there are many moments in which I love my students as a group, and many times I try for the ideal of "agape". There are also some kinds of love that are inappropriate, and so keeping the lines very clear- what is the right texture of love seems to be practically what defines a great therapist from a dangerous one. Humans are messy, love can be inexplicable, and can a human really come to love someone who hires them out of the phonebook or off psychology today, especially if they have a wife and kids at home, a personal life calling for that sort of love? I someomtimes feel my T loves me- once he said about someone else in my life :He loves you, and it had that feeling as if he'd somehow spoken for himself because his voice wa exceedingly gentle and full of emotion. But he has seen most of the worst in me and little of the best; there has never been that kiss that tells so much. . . It just seems unlikely in the grand scheme of things he loves me. I feel love for and from him, but I also know it isn't love that is tested in the messsiness of real life. There is a purity to it, but the fact that it will surely end, is meant to end, and would end if I stopped paying my bill kind of sobers me up that it is a relationship to practice loving and feeling loved, and not the real thing in real life. I think My T would be pretty mad if I asked him if he loved me, and feel his boundaries were violated by the question, and would lecture me that we do not have a social relationship but a professional one. Nonetheless the feeling of tacit love in the room is sometimes there. It seem like a gift, that could be ruined by forcing it.