I Told My Therapist I Thought She Was Hot

I’d been working with a psychotherapist for nearly a year before I realized I was attracted to her. The shift happened about 10 months after we began our weekly sessions. Prior to that, I only knew her for a face on Zoom, a couple of inches wide in my iPhone—a pretty face, sure, but the experience was otherwise disembodied. Then she moved her practice closer to my neighborhood—an acceptable commuting distance in LA—and we started to hold our meetings in person. I remember the first day, looking around the waiting room, a pile of Psychology Today magazines on a table, feeling it was all so clinical, even banal.