Gunnarsson highlights how dialectics can shed light on the relation between love and dominance, foregrounding the crucial role that ontological tensions play in self–other relating.Drawing on Roy Bhaskar’s dialectical critical realist philosophy, she expands on Jessica Benjamin’s analysis of male dominance as well as other feminist work, and elaborates on the necessity of living-with rather than seeking to escape constitutive tensions, if we are to be able to live non-oppressively and sustainably with one another.Gunnarsson also demonstrates how dialectics can account for the fact that life-enhancing impulses are often co-enfolded in oppressive practicesand elaborates on the implications that this has for the prospect of transformation.