D/s and love - like a horse and carriage?

With her latest post, called Love, sin has started another of those discussions she's so good at inspiring. The first few lines present the question:

Does D/s mean I love you?

It sounds like a simple question. No D/s doesn't necessarily mean love, though it can. 

As usual, my comment was much too long, so I decided to be efficient and reprint it here (slightly edited) as my own post. Maybe  a few of you will even comment in here? In any case, do follow the link to sin's place and add your voice to the discussion. Because of course I don't believe there is one right answer, and I am always interested in knowing how other people solve the equations of life and love.

Here's how it has played out for me and the sadist:
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A rich topic, sin.

I don't think D/s HAS to mean love. But I'm not surprised that it so often ends up that way. It requires such nakedness, such intimacy - far deeper than the mere physical. For it to really work, so much has to be revealed on both sides.

Plus you're dealing with such basic needs. Acceptance. Approval. Again, on both sides. Because doesn't the sub's obedience imply a non-judgmental acceptance of the dom's darkest fantasies?

When the sadist first approached me, and for about the first month and a half, I never expected I would end up loving him. I was excited, I was enthralled, I was obsessed. But not in love. It was the connection beyond D/s that did it: literature, music, a general enjoyment of intelligence... I was almost outraged when I saw it happening. He just laughed. He said I'd been in love with him all along.

And the sadist? His feelings for me are deep and unnamed - except in the negative. Deep but not love. Was it inevitable? I'm not his only sub, and his relationships with the others are each very different. Sometimes I think that what happened with me caught him by surprise. I think it did to an extent, but only perhaps in its intensity. It seems he knew when he spotted me on Fetlife that this would be something else. From early on, he called me his complication.

But the sadist is very good at compartmentalizing. And maybe that's what a dom must be to hold back the love. That - and blessed with a talent for coldly regarding a sub as no more than a source of amusement.

I'm curious to hear from more doms on this.