Discussions of qualia usually focus on some simple visual sensation like the colour red, or perhaps on a feeling like pain. These examples carry with them a notion of privacy and indirectly pose questions about knowing other minds. The feelings associated with physical intimacy and pleasure with another are arguable no less primitive than these and frame the question of qualia in quite a different way. Reduction of these to purely functional terms is far less acceptable, and the possibility of doubt in relation to the experience of the other has a far keener edge. The larger context of such an experience is patently essential to it, but this is only a different emphasis from the examples of red and pain. Does it introduce something new from the outside, satisfying a hunger, like food, or does it clear the way for something that was always there to emerge into salience and fill the moment with our own ecstacy, our own original alignment with all things? It must be something of both, because the pleasure is solipsistic and the dependence on the other in their full metaphysical complexity is irreducible, and their contributions to the quale impossible to separate.