The Bonding Resources
What We Share Between Us
In The Bonding Project, we use the term bonding resources to describe the things partners share with one another that are inherently limited by time, material constraints, and emotional bandwidth. These resources shape how people feel about their relationships, negotiate them, and sustain them in everyday life.
Through our earliest rounds of data collection, one finding became unmistakably clear: people do not bond the same way across all resources. Someone’s preferences around romance may look nothing like their preferences around sex, finances, or housing. When we treated “bonding”as a single, unified instinct, important differences were flattened. When we separated resources, patterns emerged with striking clarity.
That insight is why we structure the Bonding Project by resource.
Why Resources Matter
Resources are where values meet reality. They are the places where love encounters logistics, where desire meets capacity, and where ideals are tested by circumstance.
Because resources are limited, they require:
• Prioritization
• Negotiation
• Explicit or implicit agreements
Conflict often arises not from a lack of care, but from mismatched assumptions about which resources are being shared, with whom, and in what way. By naming these domains separately, we give people a clearer way to understand—and communicate—their needs.
The Bonding Resources
Romance
Romance is the most elusive and hardest to quantify, and yet, most people immediately know when it’s present or missing.
Romance might include gestures, rituals, emotional intimacy, devotion, longing, fantasy, or shared meaning. It can be quiet or grand, steady or electric. Because romance is so subjective, we begin the assessment by asking what romance means to you.
As you read your profile, hold your own definition of romance in mind. Your archetype reflects how you tend to want to give and receive romance—not a universal standard of what romance “should”be.
Sex
Sexual bonding covers how people share intimacy, desire, and erotic connection. This includes not just frequency or partners, but also meaning: what sex signifies emotionally, relationally, or spiritually.
Some people experience sex as deeply bonding and central; others experience it as playful, expressive, or largely independent from emotional attachment. Still others don’t want to experience it at all. Differences here are common, and easily misinterpreted without shared language.
Finances
Money is one of the most concrete—and charged—bonding resources. Financial bonding includes how people share expenses, make decisions, manage risk, plan for the future, and tie material security to partnership.
People who bond similarly in romance may have wildly different instincts around financial entanglement. Naming these differences early can prevent resentment and confusion later.
Housing
Housing reflects how people share space, routines, and daily life. This includes cohabitation, nesting, proximity, and domestic integration.
For some, sharing a home is the ultimate expression of intimacy. For others, maintaining separate space is essential for regulation and well-being. Neither preference is more committed or more loving, they are simply different bonding needs.
Reading Resource Archetypes Together
Each resource has its own archetype because bonding is contextual. You may find strong alignment with one archetype in romance and a very different one in finances or housing. This is not a contradiction—it’s information.
Use these sections to:
• Clarify where your instincts are consistent and where they diverge
• Communicate more precisely with partners
• Separate “we’re incompatible”from “we differ in this specific domain”
When people struggle to relate, it’s often not because people want different relationships, but because they want to share different resources in different ways. Naming that difference is often the first step toward a more honest, compassionate, and workable connection.
© The Bonding Project 2026