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“Intimate relationships” and “intimacy” might have various meanings for people in Mexico. For many individuals living in conditions of high marginalisation, the presence of two apparently contradictory elements is common: randomness and strong social norms. Randomness is associated to everyday poverty and the lack of material conditions that would allow individuals for certain control over their own intimacy processes. Simultaneously, prevailing social norms are associated to gender and social class hierarchies, rendering intimate relationships with a clear power unbalance. This chapter offers the main findings of a research project in Mexico on the social origin of the intimacy developed by lower social class men and women. We show here that love is a social competence historically determined by the social conditions that produce it. Intimacy, too. Through a qualitative analysis of ten in-depth interviews conducted with women who have suffered severe intimate partner violence, we show how, in the social production of their everyday life, individuals produce the material conditions that make it possible for certain feelings to prevail over others, such feelings being expressed under specific norms. The “domestic production of feelings” (following Heller) is mediated by both structural determinants (such as the dominant forms of masculinity and femininity, social class and culture), and by specific interactional patterns within the couples.

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