In Denmark, special partnership counselling is offered to soldiers and war veterans and their partners. These courses build upon peer-to-peer communication: military personnel trained as partnership counsellors educate soldiers and their partners about proper communication in loving relationships. I was allowed to follow these courses as an ethnographer during 2016 and 2017 as part of a project on Danish war veterans’ understandings and experiences of intimacy. Building on this research, in this presentation I want to explore the affective economies of gender and sexuality in the intimate encounters between trained counsellors, course participants, and the observing ethnographer. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s analytics of affect and emotion, Arlie Hochschild’s work on emotional labor, and feminist notions of vulnerability I will look at how transference of intimacy opens up spaces for understanding the vulnerable “Other”. In particular, I will focus on how ethnographic understandings of gender and sexuality are immersed in the transference of vulnerable gendered and sexualed subjectivities from counsellors and participants on the one side to the ethnographer on the other. Reflecting on my ethnographic fieldwork in this sense, this presentation thus engages with the embodied and affective dimensions of knowledge production about gender and sexuality