Relationship context should condition the read — "unearned intimacy" (stranger's "i love you" = wariness, not warmth)

[deucebucket]

Design finding #11 (surfaced from the pet showcase 2026-06-17, logged in docs/v8_audit_log.md).

Observation

"i love you" reads strongly positive in isolation (V=179, W=184) — which is correct for the language layer: compute_vadug reads a sentence's inherent content and has no idea who is speaking. But a stranger professing love is incongruous and should read as wariness, not warmth. The emotional meaning of an utterance is conditioned by the relationship: strong-bond language ("love", "miss you", high-Intent bonding) arriving with no relational grounding is a boundary/incongruity signal — "unearned intimacy."

Where it lives (engine ↔ soul)

• Do NOT change the context-free language read. "love" must not become cold by default; the stateless per-sentence path stays correct.
• The incongruity is a clanker-soul / relation-layer coupling: the engine's per-sentence read × the speaker's earned affinity/history (RelationStore). Analogous to soul's armor/breach, but for intimacy instead of injury.
• Mechanic: when an utterance's intimacy/valence far exceeds the earned affinity, pull V down, lift A/U, apply a guarded dominance/boundary shift. As affinity is earned, the same words warm into genuine warmth.
• Optional supporting engine structure UNEARNED_INTIMACY (intimacy-mismatch) that fires only when relational context is supplied to the engine.

Acceptance / needs

• Decide engine-structure vs soul-only (or both).
• Define the threshold: utterance intimacy vs earned affinity.
• Define the guarded-wariness delta (V↓, A↑, U↑, D/boundary).
• Keep FP-zero on genuinely warm, established relationships (earned intimacy must read as warmth).

Cross-links

• Engine audit log: docs/v8_audit_log.md finding #11 (gitignored local doc).
• Same principle underpins the vadugwi "Read the Room" instrument (how you read a bid depends on the relationship).
• Related repo: deucebucket/clanker-soul (relation/soul coupling implementation home).