Forget the side hustle grind. Ella Love found something better, and she’s only working three hours a day.

Love, 51, spent 13 years teaching in New York public schools before she decided she’d had enough. The class sizes, the funding shortages, the discipline problems—it was a fast-track to burnout. “The stress came from large class sizes, not having time for anything, discipline problems, limited funds for materials,” she told the NY Post. “It’s extremely different in America.”

So in 2017, she found an article about professional cuddling, paid $300 for an online course, and tried it on the side while still teaching. Within six months, she took a sabbatical and never went back.

Eight years later, she charges $150 an hour, works roughly three hours a day, and pulls in anywhere from $60,000 to $100,000 a year.

This Woman Makes Up to $100,000 a Year as a Professional Cuddler

What surprises most people, she says, is what actually happens during a session. “People think they’re just paying for a hug, but that’s not what happens. The touch activates suppressed emotions. They suddenly start remembering things, opening up, telling me things they’ve never said out loud before. It becomes a very intense therapeutic experience.”

Her average client is a middle-aged married man with a good job and zero intimacy at home. “They don’t want to cheat or leave their partner, but there’s no intimacy. They’ve grown apart, there are communication problems, and they feel completely disconnected.”

Love is very upfront about what this is and what it isn’t. She interviews every client, and not everyone gets accepted. The boundaries are clear from the start, and she’s had eight years of practice enforcing them. When bodies do what bodies sometimes do, she handles it without making it a bigger deal than it is.

“If a client gets aroused, you have to remind them it’s just a physiological response,” she says. “I tell them it’s natural, but you cannot act on it. You breathe, you change position, and you move on. That’s part of the professionalism.”

She also works with clients on the autism spectrum who have never experienced safe, consensual touch at all.

Most clients keep their visits secret. “There’s still a stigma around it, which is a shame,” she says. Her personal life has taken some hits, too. The emotional intimacy of the work has complicated more than a few of her own relationships. “It takes a very confident and trusting partner to date me.”

But Love is clear about what this actually is. “The touch is actually a small part of it. The real work is emotional intimacy, vulnerability, and trust.”

A former art teacher figured that out faster than most therapists do.