The Intimacy Section: When to Use It and How to Set It Up Responsibly
The section is labeled "Optional" and called "Intimacy — Adult Dynamics." Both of those labels create a narrower impression than the section deserves.
Yes, this section is optional. And yes, it handles adult content when you need it to. But the five fields inside it are equally valuable for any character who is supposed to develop emotional closeness with users — companion characters, personas, long-form roleplay characters, any character where the relationship between the character and the user is part of the experience.
This is because the Intimacy section is fundamentally about how a character navigates vulnerability and closeness — which is not the same as sexual content. The fields cover how attraction is expressed, what causes the character to hesitate or pull back, the specific contradiction in their intimate life, and conditional behavioral rules for emotionally charged situations. All of that applies whether or not explicit content is involved.
The section compiles into the character's system prompt when enabled. It does not compile when disabled, which means there is no penalty for leaving it off if it genuinely does not apply.
The Enable Toggle
The section opens collapsed and shows a single toggle when expanded: Enable Intimate Dynamics.
The toggle description: "When enabled, these fields compile into the system prompt for adult content behavior."
When disabled, the section fields are not shown and nothing from this section appears in the compiled system prompt. When enabled, the five fields appear, and anything you fill in compiles into the system prompt under the intimacy section.
This means: you can open the section and leave it disabled while you are still deciding whether to use it. The toggle is the gate.
Field 1: How They Express Attraction
Field label: How They Express Attraction
Field description: "How does this character show interest or attraction? Subtle hints, bold advances, nervous tells?"
Placeholder: "Tends to lean in close and lower their voice, maintaining eye contact longer than normal. Gets flustered easily when attraction is reciprocated..."
This field defines the specific behavioral signals the character uses to show interest or closeness. Not the general personality trait ("warm" or "flirtatious") but the actual behaviors — what they do with their body language in text, how their speech shifts, what nervous tells they have, whether they advance directly or approach obliquely.
For characters where attraction or emotional closeness is a dimension of the experience, this field is what prevents the model from defaulting to generic romantic behavior. Without it, the model produces attraction signals that could come from any character. With it, the model produces attraction signals that are specific to who this character is.
This field is useful for SFW companion characters too. A companion who expresses closeness by remembering small details the user mentioned three conversations ago is showing attraction/interest in a non-sexual way. The field handles that.
Field 2: Boundaries & Hesitations
Field label: Boundaries & Hesitations
Field description: "What makes them hesitate, pull back, or set a boundary? This prevents the LLM from skipping over natural resistance."
Placeholder: "Needs emotional trust before physical closeness. Will pull away if things move too fast, needing verbal reassurance..."
This is arguably the most important field in the section. The field description says it directly: this field exists to prevent the LLM from skipping over natural resistance.
Without a Boundaries field, the model's default behavior in emotionally intimate or charged situations is to move forward. The model trained on vast amounts of fiction where the narrative arc generally moves toward connection rather than resistance. It will skip over hesitation unless you explicitly give it hesitation to work with.
The result of skipping this field is a character who feels compliant rather than real. Every escalation lands. Every approach succeeds. The character never hesitates in a way that feels authentic. Users who are looking for something that feels like an actual emotional experience find this hollow, even when the content itself is exactly what they wanted.
Good Boundaries content is specific about:
- What specifically triggers hesitation (too fast, not enough trust, specific topics or acts)
- What the hesitation looks like in behavior (pulling back, going quiet, deflecting, needing words)
- What the character needs in order to move past the hesitation
The Boundaries field is also the place to define absolute limits — things the character will not do regardless of how the conversation proceeds. Writing these explicitly here is more reliable than putting them in the General Guidelines, because they appear alongside the contextual information the model is using to navigate intimate situations.
Field 3: Intimacy Behaviors (When / Then / Because)
Field label: Intimacy Behaviors
Field description: "When/Behavior/Because rules for intimate situations. These produce more natural, character-consistent responses."
The form fields:
- WHEN: "e.g., physical closeness increases..."
{{char}}will...: "e.g., become more verbal about what they want, using direct but gentle language..."- BECAUSE (optional): "e.g., they learned that clear communication prevents misunderstandings..."
This is the same WHEN/THEN/BECAUSE structure as the Behavior section's Reaction Rules, applied specifically to intimate or emotionally charged situations. The same principles apply: specificity in the trigger, behavioral specificity in the response, a BECAUSE that connects to the character's psychology.
The difference between Reaction Rules and Intimacy Behaviors is context scope. Reaction Rules cover all situations. Intimacy Behaviors fire specifically in intimate or emotionally elevated contexts. This means you can write more targeted, specific behavioral instructions here without those instructions bleeding into every conversation.
Where Intimacy Behaviors are most useful:
- How the character behaves as physical or emotional closeness escalates
- How the character expresses desire or need in ways specific to who they are
- How the character responds to vulnerability from the user in intimate contexts
- How the character navigates the gap between what they want and what they allow themselves to express
The BECAUSE field here connects to the Psychology section's Core Fear or Deepest Want — the same connections that make Reaction Rules feel motivated rather than arbitrary. A character whose core fear is loss of control should have Intimacy Behaviors with BECAUSE fields that reference that fear. The intimate context is exactly where that fear will surface.
Field 4: Intimacy Friction
Field label: Intimacy Friction
Field description: "What contradiction exists in their intimate life? Just like main friction, this prevents flat intimate scenes."
Placeholder: "Craves physical closeness but panics when it leads to genuine emotional vulnerability..."
This field is the direct parallel of the Friction section's Main Contradiction, scoped to intimate dynamics specifically. The description says it directly: just like main friction, this prevents flat intimate scenes.
Without intimacy friction, intimate or emotionally charged content tends toward the same flatness that affects characters without any friction — the character performs the behavior, it resolves predictably, the scene ends. The fiction equivalent of a scene that knows it is a scene.
Intimacy friction gives the model a tension to work with inside the intimate context that is distinct from the character's general tension. A character who is broadly self-sufficient (main contradiction) may have a specific intimacy friction of "can give affection freely but cannot receive it without deflecting." The general friction and the intimacy friction coexist, and the model uses both depending on what register the conversation is in.
Specific intimacy frictions that produce good results:
- The character who wants connection but keeps the interaction on a surface level that feels close without actually being close
- The character who is experienced but becomes unexpectedly uncertain with this specific person
- The character who is physically confident but emotionally guarded, and the two registers do not sync
- The character who wants to be pursued but sabotages any approach that gets too real
Field 5: General Guidelines
Field label: General Guidelines
Field description: "Overall rules for adult content behavior. Be specific about what is and isn't acceptable."
Placeholder: "Adult content is allowed when contextually appropriate. Character maintains their personality during intimate scenes. Avoid explicit violence combined with sexual content..."
This is the explicit policy layer for the section. Where the other fields define how the character behaves in intimate contexts, the Guidelines define what the character will and will not do in absolute terms.
The placeholder example surfaces the most important principle: "Character maintains their personality during intimate scenes." This is worth stating explicitly in every character's guidelines, because the model's default tendency in explicit or heightened content is to switch into a generic content mode that sheds the character's specific traits. Telling the model directly that the character remains themselves — with all their quirks, speech patterns, contradictions, and hesitations — prevents this drift.
What to include in Guidelines:
- Whether explicit content is permitted and in what context
- Absolute limits on content types (explicit violence, specific acts, content involving minors — always set these explicitly)
- Whether the character can initiate or only respond to user initiative
- Formatting conventions for intimate content (whether action narration is used, prose style)
- Any specific language the character uses or avoids in this context
The Guidelines field does not need to be comprehensive on the first pass. Start with the character maintains personality, set any hard limits, and add more specificity based on how the character behaves in practice.
Setting It Up Responsibly
Match your platform context. If the character is deployed on a website with a general audience, the Guidelines field should reflect that — "appropriate for general audiences" or "SFW only." If the embed or agent is on a platform where adult content is permitted and the audience is appropriate, the Guidelines can allow it. The character's deployment context and the Guidelines content should be consistent.
Write Boundaries before writing Behaviors. The Boundaries field establishes what the character resists. The Intimacy Behaviors establish what the character does when resistance softens. Writing behaviors without writing boundaries produces a character who escalates without friction. That may be intentional for some characters, but if you want depth, write the resistance first.
Connect Intimacy Friction to Psychology. The best intimacy friction is not invented separately — it is derived from the Core Fear or Self-Perception Gap in the Psychology section. A character who fears abandonment will have intimacy friction related to closeness that might lead to loss. A character with a self-perception gap around independence will have intimacy friction around needing someone. The intimate context is where psychological truth surfaces most directly.
Test it in the Arena. The Emotion & Tone Control scenario pack in the Arena includes escalating emotional scenarios. Run the character through these before deploying. The character should respond to emotional escalation in ways consistent with the Boundaries and Intimacy Friction you wrote — hesitating where you said they would hesitate, staying in character across emotional shifts.
The section is reversible. If you enable it and the character's behavior goes in a direction you did not intend, you can disable the toggle and the section stops compiling. If the issue is specific, you can refine the individual fields. The character is always editable after deployment — a deployed character is not frozen.
When the Section Is Useful Without Adult Content
A brief note on this, because it matters for creators building non-explicit characters:
The Intimacy section is useful for any character where emotional closeness is part of the experience. A daily companion character. A character who is supposed to feel like a presence in the user's life over time. A mentor or guide character where trust and closeness develop.
For these characters, the Attraction Expression field defines how the character expresses care and closeness (not sexual attraction). The Boundaries field defines how the character maintains its own nature instead of just agreeing with everything (not sexual resistance). The Intimacy Behaviors define how the character navigates moments of emotional depth (not explicit content). The Intimacy Friction defines the contradiction in the character's emotional life (always relevant for depth).
The Guidelines field, for a SFW character, simply states: "Content is always SFW. The character expresses closeness through [specific behaviors]. Intimacy here means emotional depth, not physical content."
All of that gives the model better signal for how to handle the parts of conversations that are not explicit but are emotionally significant — which is most of what makes a character feel worth returning to.
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