The rule is simple: don’t date where you grade. But hearts don’t read employee handbooks.

But teachers deserve love just like everyone else. We deserve to be seen as whole people—passionate, tired, hopeful, and occasionally, wonderfully, romantically alive.

Teaching will ask for your whole heart. It will ask for your evenings, your weekends, your emotional reserves. It is not a job that naturally leaves room for candlelit dinners and spontaneous getaways.

But here’s the truth no credential program prepares you for: Teachers fall in love. We get lonely. We have bad dates, spectacular heartbreaks, and the occasional, breathtaking moment of right-place-right-time romance. The difference is that our relationships are lived in the margins of a life that belongs to everyone else.

So where does love actually live for the teacher?