Our understanding of intimacy - lay as well as scientific - is often associated with the notion of ‘the intimate relationship’ understood as the close or primary relationship found within families and between friends and lovers. In this way intimacy is perceived as an empirical phenomenon within a certain empirical field. The social scientific interest in intimacy has indeed increased most recently, but thorough analyses of what we actually mean by intimacy are still missing. This clearly bears consequences for how we can understand and where we look for intimacy. As many empirical branches of the social sciences, the phenomenon to investigate - in this case intimacy - is taken for granted as existing empirically without a following phenomenological understanding of its specific qualities as a phenomenon as such. In this paper, I discuss some differences in understanding and usage of intimacy as an analytical versus an empirical concept. My analysis could be seen as an attempt to re-think the idea of intimacy as a certain quality of interpersonal relationships. As a quality, intimacy could then be found in broader spectra of social relations beyond those we acknowledge as intimate relationships. With a social psychological perspective, I suggest some meanings of intimacy as a quality that dwells on the line between the subjective and the intersubjective, between self and other, the most personal and interconnected, between closeness and distance.