Intimacy and Love are directly linked to each other at the hip.
Love
noun
1. a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.
2. a feeling of warm personal attachment or deep affection, as for a parent, child, or friend.
Intimacy
noun, plural intimacies.
1. the state of being
intimate.
2. a close, familiar, and usually affectionate or loving personal relationship with another person or group.
3. a close association with or detailed knowledge or deep understanding of a place, subject, period of history, etc.
To be intimate is to be loving, and to be loving is to be intimate. It's just like how a sound can describe a noise, and a noise can describe a sound--it's a cyclical definition, there's several of them in the English language. If you care about someone, and want to help them through troubles in their life, and feel as though your life is better with them than without them--you love them. There's different variations of love--familial, romantic, sexual, friendly, et cetera. You can also feel love for more than just a person, you can feel love for an idea, or a concept, or a piece of property. Passion is related to love, and passion is what convinces artists and writers to pour in hundreds of hours of work to create a non-real thing. Love is linked to patriotism, love is linked to idealism, love of mankind is linked to optimism, and so on. Love is an integral human emotion, you need it to give yourself value and meaning... In the things that you do, in the people that you surround yourself with, and ultimately for yourself. A life without love is a life devoid of warmth. It's an eternal winter for the soul, and that's not sustainable in the long term, it'll make you squirrely.
We're social animals. By that nature we need people in our lives to love, and be loved by. In doing so, we're intimate. Basically: Love is a description of a feeling, and intimacy is a description of
acting on that feeling. An intimate act is inherently one of love, one of compassion, one of gentleness. It's one of the most ideal aspects of humanity, one of our best qualities. You cannot separate one from the other without making it false, or filled with sorrow.
If you love someone, you will be intimate with them. If you're intimate toward someone, you're expressing a loving and gentle and compassionate act. They're tied together, like many aspects of being human are. It's a wonderful thing, really.