Almost everyone who arrives here has already asked themselves the question in the title, usually at three in the morning, usually while waiting for a reply. The question feels urgent because it seems to decide everything: if this is love, I should stay and try harder; if this is dependence, I am broken and should leave. Neither conclusion is true, and the question as posed cannot be answered, because love, attachment and fear are not alternatives. They are three different systems that happen to switch on at the same time.
Love, in the sense used here, is a pull towards another person's actual life: their wellbeing, their day, their thoughts, their becoming. Attachment is the older, more physical system that treats a specific person as the place where safety lives. Fear is what fires when that place looks like it might disappear. You can have all three at once. You can also have attachment and fear with very little love left underneath — this is what people usually mean when they say they are staying out of habit.
So the useful question is not "is this love or dependence?" but "how much of what I am feeling right now is about them, and how much is about the state I go into when I cannot reach them?" Longing for someone you love is not a symptom. Being unable to return to a steady baseline without their input is a different phenomenon, and it is the one this programme addresses.
Notice that nothing here requires you to decide about the relationship. People often assume that examining dependence is the first step towards leaving. It is not. Plenty of people finish this work and stay, with far more freedom inside the same relationship. What changes is who is making the decision: you, or the alarm.
What are you trying not to feel? Sometimes the question underneath 'is this love or dependence?' is simpler: what emotion am I trying not to have? Emotional avoidance is rarely a deliberate choice. We simply discover behaviours that temporarily make the feeling disappear: alcohol, sex, attention, dating, scrolling, shopping, work, fantasy, constantly talking to someone, seeking reassurance, returning to an unhealthy relationship. Any of these can be a pleasure, a habit, or a way of not being present with what hurts.
The useful question is not 'what am I doing?' but 'what do I not have to feel while I am doing it?' Loneliness, rejection, uncertainty, boredom, inadequacy, grief — these are hard to sit with. Being free to love does not mean becoming detached or needing nobody. It means becoming increasingly able to experience loneliness, uncertainty, rejection, desire and vulnerability without automatically abandoning yourself to escape them.
This applies to every gender. Some people seek repeated access to highly desirable partners or paid companionship. For some men, paying for the company of conventionally attractive women may be simply a consensual choice. For others, the experience may quietly be meeting something deeper: a need to feel desirable, powerful, successful, or simply less alone. The psychological question is not 'why would a man pay for a woman's company?' but 'what emotional need is this experience meeting for him?' Apply the same principle to women and to every form of external validation. When you can ask that question without shame, you stop outsourcing your comfort to experiences that leave the original feeling untouched.