Long story short: When I first met my husband, he was recently widowed and just wanted a transactional arrangement to get his mind off things. It stayed that way until he suddenly got meningitis. I was terrified at the thought of losing him as a person, so I upended my life to be with him and take care of him, even though I didn't have to. That’s the moment it stopped being transactional. We got married last year.

Hah, joke's on you.

My cats literally won't eat when someone else feeds them. If my neighbors feed the cats when I'm out for a few days, the cats will wait basically untill they're starving before eating, because (presumably) the neighbors have fed them wrong for some reason.

I've had a message that was basically "We saw no food, so we fed them, and then they didn't eat at all!". Yeah, it takes about a day for food to become free of the taint of unknown tresspassers.

my pet loves me because I give her belly rubs before she gets out of bed in the morning

she will not get out of bed until the belly rubs happen

her relationship with food is a little more feral

This is how it is with most relationships. So many of my friendships started because I sparked someone up on a joint

Nah. It's more like "I know the human loves me, because they feed me".

My pets love me because I feed them and let them sleep under the covers with me.

Yeah they traumatize the shit out of you

Yeah but I wouldn't fuck my pets.

Actually, Harry Harlowe did an experiment back in the 50s to test this theory. He took some baby rhesus monkeys and separated them from their mothers. Then he gave them some artificial mothers. One mother was a metal wire doll of a monkey. One mother was a cloth doll of a monkey. One nice to touch, one unpleasant to touch. Then he studied how the baby monkeys formed attachments to their doll mothers.

He found that even if the wire mother gives milk and the cloth mothers don't, the babies still prefer the cloth mothers that are nice to touch. They would cuddle with the cloth mothers and seek them out for comfort when scared. This proved that touch is a more important factor in attachment than food.

So kids are just a pet with benefits