A reader wrote in with a question that sounds simple and is not: "I told my Dominant I love him. He said it isn't love — that I'm just using him as a tool. Is he right, and what is the difference between liking someone and loving them?" They had known each other six months, lived in different cities, met about once a month, and video-called in between. They shared everyday highs and lows, and being soothed by him felt like happiness. What he named, abruptly, was that the care flowing in one direction had started to feel like extraction.
This is a relationship question before it is a BDSM question, but power-exchange dynamics make it sharper: roles can make care look structural, and distance can turn a partner into a function. Below is a psychology framework for untangling it — adapted from a community Q&A, written for consenting adults, and not a substitute for a qualified therapist.
Love or Like: Two Different Emotions
Start by dropping one common assumption: that love is a higher grade of like, or that liking someone is merely an early version of loving them. It is a tidy ladder, and it is misleading. Liking and loving are two basic, distinct emotional configurations. One is not a waypoint on the road to the other.
That distinction matters in D/s, where intensity is easy to mistake for depth. A scene can produce enormous closeness in a few hours, and a daily video call can produce enormous reliance over a few months. Neither, on its own, tells you which emotion you are in.
Sternberg's Triangular Theory of Love
The most widely used framework here comes from American psychologist Robert J. Sternberg, whose triangular theory of love treats love not as a single feeling but as three interacting components:
- Intimacy — closeness, mutual disclosure, the sense of being known and being safe with what is known.
- Passion — longing, physical pull, the charge that rises with a response and falls with distance.
- Commitment — the decision to keep investing in this actual person, including when they stop meeting your expectations.
Different combinations produce different kinds of love, and "liking" sits inside the same model rather than below it. Sternberg's map is descriptive, not a scorecard: it tells you what is present, not whether you are doing relationships correctly.
Three Questions: Love vs Dependency Test
Think of one specific person — the one this question is actually about — and answer yes or no. Write the answers down before you start explaining them to yourself.
- Intimacy: Do you want to share the parts of your day, your vulnerabilities and your secrets that nobody else hears about?
- Passion: Do you long for closeness and physical affection, and does their response visibly lift or lower your mood?
- Commitment: If they no longer met what you hoped for in a partner, would you still choose to invest effort in, respect and care for the real person — rather than leave?
Three answers, eight possible combinations. The pattern is more useful than any single answer, because most of us are fluent at justifying the one we want.
What Each Love Type Looks Like in D/s
Here is the full eight-combination map, with what each tends to look like inside a power-exchange dynamic.
| Intimacy | Passion | Commitment | Name | In a D/s dynamic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| No | No | No | Non-love | A familiar regular, like the person who makes your coffee each morning. No particular bond. |
| Yes | No | No | Liking | You value how they listen, soothe and understand you — the emotional value, not the whole person. |
| No | Yes | No | Infatuation | Fixation on a trait, a role, a body or an imagined version of them, with no wish for deep exchange. |
| Yes | Yes | No | Romantic love | Real closeness and real charge, deliberately kept short-term; either person could end it. |
| No | No | Yes | Empty love | The structure remains out of duty or a shared plan, long after the sharing and the charge have gone. |
| Yes | No | Yes | Companionate love | Long-horizon partnership: conversation, friction, ordinary days, no fireworks, steady investment. |
| No | Yes | Yes | Fatuous love | Fast intensity turned into fast promises — moving in, big plans — before the ordinary differences were known. |
| Yes | Yes | Yes | Consummate love | All three present. Not a permanent state and not a conflict-free one; it has to be maintained. |
Two rows deserve a pause. In the "liking" row, what you love is the function the person performs — which is precisely the shape of the reader's accusation. In the "fatuous" row, commitment was built before knowledge, which is a familiar risk when a powerful scene accelerates a timeline.
Love Without Commitment Is Still Love
Many people insist that a "no" on question three cannot count as love at all — that a relationship without lasting responsibility is, by definition, deficient. Notice what happens at that moment: we have stopped describing a psychological pattern and started issuing a moral requirement. The question quietly moves from psychology into philosophy. Is love an involuntary feeling, or a will that carries obligations?
There is no correct answer, but there is a very practical consequence: two people who answer that question differently will keep hurting each other, because each will read the other as failing at something the other never agreed was the task. In negotiated, non-traditional relationship structures this is worth saying explicitly. Choose someone whose definition of love matches yours, and put that definition into words before either of you is disappointed.
Long-Distance Love and One-Sided Care
Back to the letter. It is entirely plausible that during the few days they met, all three components were present at once — closeness, charge and a felt promise — and that what they had in those days was real. The strain appears in the return to distance: daily video calls in which one person repeatedly brings their whole emotional weather to be settled, and the other person does the settling. Over time, being needed that constantly stops feeling like being chosen.
So the sharper question is not "is this liking or loving?" It is: am I asking this person to meet my needs without noticing that they have needs of their own? That is the imbalance the Dominant was pointing at, and it is a structural problem rather than a verdict on your feelings. Distance amplifies it because a screen makes a partner available as a service while hiding their fatigue. If this is your situation, our guide to whether a long-distance D/s relationship can work covers the practical rhythms, and the piece on the dependent psychology of subs looks at the pull from the other side.
Emotional Dependency and Feeling Used
"Tool person" is a blunt phrase for a precise experience: being valued for regulation rather than for oneself. It is worth separating three things that often get bundled together — genuine attachment, the afterglow of a scene, and the habit of outsourcing every difficult hour to one person. The first two are normal; the third is what a partner experiences as extraction.
Some workable adjustments, none of which require you to feel less:
- Distribute support. Friends, a journal, a therapist, a routine — one person should not be the sole load-bearing wall for your mood.
- Agree on a contact rhythm instead of reaching out whenever a feeling spikes. Predictability is kinder to both sides than availability.
- Name which need you are bringing. "I want to tell you about my day" and "I need you to fix how I feel" are different requests; say which one it is.
- Ask about their day, and wait for the answer. Reciprocity is the simplest test of whether a person is present to you as a person.
- Separate roles from ordinary life. A Dominant's attentiveness inside a negotiated dynamic is not a standing contract for unlimited emotional labour outside it.
If you are on the receiving end, the essay on emotional disconnect in D/s relationships describes what a genuinely one-sided dynamic looks like — which is a different problem from a partner who is simply tired. Both deserve an honest conversation, and our guide to rules and agreements in a D/s relationship is a useful place to start one.
Commitment Collars and What They Signal
Because commitment is the component most often left unspoken, some pairs mark it with an object. A commitment collar can carry that meaning quietly in everyday life, and the wider collars and leashes range includes pieces designed for formal scenes. But a symbol is a reminder of a promise, not a substitute for one: the object cannot do the work of question three. If the answer to that question is uncertain, buying something to settle it usually postpones the conversation rather than having it.
The same logic applies to titles, protocols and labels. They are useful when they point at an agreement both people can describe; they are hollow when they are asked to stand in for one.
Love, Aftercare and Honest Check-Ins
Aftercare is usually discussed as what happens after a scene, but the underlying idea scales up: deliberate attention to how someone is doing, at a moment when nothing is being asked of them. A monthly, ordinary, unsexy check-in — "is this still working for you?" — catches imbalance long before it turns into an accusation.
It also protects against a specific trap of power exchange, where one person becomes practised at reading the other's states and the other becomes unused to being asked. The psychology of submission is largely about trust, and trust is maintained by being curious about someone's experience rather than confident you already know it. Feelings here are not a test with a pass mark; the useful move is to keep asking, and to let the answer change.
Love or Dependency FAQ
Is dependency always a bad sign in a D/s relationship?
No. Some reliance is normal and often chosen deliberately. It becomes a problem when one person's needs are consistently met and the other's are consistently invisible.
Can you love someone without commitment?
Psychologically, yes — several of Sternberg's types have passion and intimacy without a long-term decision. Whether that counts as "real love" is a values question, and partners should answer it together rather than assume they agree.
Does distance make emotional dependency worse?
It tends to. Limited contact can turn a partner into a scheduled source of reassurance, with fewer ordinary cues that they are tired or having their own bad day.
How do I tell liking from loving?
Look at the third question: whether you would still invest in the real person once the benefits you enjoy stopped arriving. Liking often centres on what someone does for you.
Should a collar be used to define the relationship?
Only after the definition is already agreed in words. A symbol works well as a reminder, not as a way to avoid the conversation.
What if we simply want different things?
That is information, not failure. Naming it early is kinder than letting one person keep hoping and the other keep feeling used.
All Dominitoy guides are written for consenting adults. This article discusses relationship psychology for general reflection only; it is not clinical advice, and it is no substitute for a qualified mental-health professional. Practice SSC/RACK: negotiate openly, keep check-ins and safewords in place, and treat every person in a dynamic as someone with needs of their own.
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