The paper analyses practices of intimacy among youth in a poor, crime-ridden neighbourhood of Santiago. It argues that their sense of belonging to their neighbourhood and broader society is disjunctive: they inhabit the nationstate without complying with expectations of proper citizenship. Similarly, they dwell in their neighbourhood without identifying with it. Instead, they turn to intimate relations with friends and lovers as spaces of belonging. Through these often failing relationships, they pursue emotional and socioeconomic stability and seek to fulfil expectations of social becoming and mobility. Drawing on Berlant’s (2007)understanding of intimacy as a normative, yet utopian, affective promise that allows for imagining possibilities of a good life and Das’ (2010) suggestion that romantic love can be a moral exercise in the realisation of an adjacent self, we argue that intimacy constitutes a key site in the quest for social belonging among subaltern youth in neoliberal Chile.