it's the intensity of emotion that's the real hallmark of the interaction, and it's just slipped into cultural understanding as a sexual thing in the same way that intimacy is present in cultural understanding as a sexual thing.

Oooh! I really like that take on it -- and again, I love how this undermines the thing I hate most about classic a/b/o, which is the straightforward biological determinism of it; this is more like how humans actually deal with their biological urges, where there is actually a very complicated thing happening which has had all its ambiguity collapsed into a single socially acceptable interpretation.