HOW INTIMACY WORKS How and why?
It will take the rest of this book to answer that question adequately. But some preliminary answers deserve attention now. Over all of history, authorities have built their own templates of social relations and their boundaries into enforceable obligations and rights. Over most of history, however, valuation and compensation have occurred in nonmonetary forms, for example, by awarding title to land, services, symbols, or persons. That is still true in some branches of law, notably criminal law, where valuation, retribution, and compensation commonly concern life, honor, and freedom. In cases of disaster, accident, and lethal malfeasance, families reckon justice in terms of retribution, responsibility, and recognition of personal suffering as well as financial loss. Nevertheless, with the expansion of monetized markets, Western legal systems did shift increasingly to monetary valuation, retribution, and compensation. Thus the legal arena frequently matches monetary transactions with soc
