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The paper rejects both (a) radical dichotomies between intimate and impersonal social relations, with their implication of utter incommensurability between the extremes, and (b) reduction of such social processes to purely cultural, economic, or political phenomena. It proposes a view of differentiated ties – recognition that in all sorts of social settings people differentiate strongly among different kinds of interpersonal relations, marking them with distinctive names, symbols, practices, and media of exchange. Such differentiated ties compound into distinctive circuits, each incorporating somewhat different understandings, practices, information, obligations, rights, symbols, and media of exchange.Parallel difficulties and possible resolutions in these regards appear in three apparently unconnected literatures: economic sociology, legal philosophy, and feminist arguments.