As you've probably heard at some point, biblical Greek had three, or possibly four, words for 'Love', providing easy categorisations of the spectrum of affection that tend to get lumped together in English. CS Lewis unpacks them at length in 'The Four Loves'. He finds himself changing his view along the way that 'Eros' is always selfish, but also showing that Eros is more than just sexual.

Which is a long introduction to arguing that you're best off not asking 'Does he love you?', but rather rejoice in the fact that he's caring enough about you to change his behaviour when he realises it's making you unhappy, that you are good together, and if you are making a positive difference in his life, then it's all good.

Beyond that? The questions are: 'What do you REALLY want from him?' and 'Would that be good for him?'. Which is a polite way to ask: 'Do you want to have sex with him?' If so, then you are on dangerous territory: it may happen very naturally and proceed to totally mess up your friendship. Or it may happen, and he gets fixated on it. Or it may be a minor part of an ongoing relationship.

Or it may not.

You're the adult, you have some idea about this whole area, certainly a lot more than he has. You need to think out what you really really want (and on the whole I think you are very lucky with what you've got now, don't let it go sexual!) Beyond that, the challenge is to present a message that lets him know that whether he's interested in sex with you or not, you don't want it to happen. One way might be to talk about what you think about sex outside marriage in general: how hard you try to get the subject to come up is a different matter, and of course it does depend on how mature and knowledgeable he is, though I suspect kids almost always do know more than we believe.

I hope these thoughts are helpful. I'm strongly committed to the belief that BLs can be a very positive influence in boy's lives; we just have to be careful and not risk the very positive impact we are having by sexualising the friendship.