Anyone who’s observed me with my lover will tell you, we touch almost constantly. One of our friends has described it as orbiting each other. Our body language when we’re together is almost more animal than human, sometimes. The one thing they may not notice about all that touching is that it isn’t sexual. We touch for every reason under the sun, to express joy, comfort, gratitude, apology, forgiveness, sorrow, amusement, and simple togetherness, because people need touch. We’re programmed for it. The problem all too many people face is that touch tends to get tangled up with sex, and that causes people to develop hang ups about touching each other; either because we as a society have hang ups about sex, or because they don’t want to have sex so they don’t touch.

It’s been proven time and again that touch is important to a healthy lifestyle. An otherwise healthy baby that receives everything it needs to grow and be healthy will still become sickly if it isn’t held and comforted. Harry Frederic Harlow conducted a series of experiments on monkeys regarding the importance of touch in development. The experiments were both cruel and highly controversial, but they proved that monkeys who didn’t have touch comfort would become sickly more often than those who did, and that monkeys raised without touch failed to assimilate with other monkeys. Even though the experiments were aimed at touch during developmental periods, it would be foolish to think that we stop needing touch as we get older. A hug or a caress can comfort, and those who are happy heal easier and get sick less often. Touching releases oxytocin, which helps form bonds between individuals, and studies have shown can also aid in wound healing.

For all too many people, they only touch when it somehow involves sex. They get themselves into a cycle where a touch leads to a kiss, and a kiss leads to sex. Then, when they don’t want to have sex, that touch starts to look like a bad thing. It’s a cycle that needs to be broken. Sometimes a touch can be just a touch. Friends, even, should really touch more if they’re comfortable enough with each other to do so. There’s a train of thought that I’ve even caught myself falling into more than once. If I want physical intimacy, I often ask for sex, even if it isn’t really sex I’m craving. Sometimes the urge I seek to sate with sex is simply the urge to be touched. I find that sometimes sex turns into a means to be touched and held, even when just the touch would have been enough to sate the urge without the sex. I think I noticed the difference most distinctly before I became sexually active, though, because even with no sex drive to speak of, I still loved to curl up in cuddle piles with my closest friends, or lean against them when we were all sitting around together. Even before I met someone who I could touch openly, I would walk a little too close and touch a little too much when I was talking to someone.

My lover is a lot like me. We both touch as a form of communication. Our body language tends to be extremely physical. Often when I greet him, I’ll rub up against him in an almost cat-like gesture, or tuck my head under his chin. It isn’t a greeting until we’ve touched. If one of us is expressing approval of the other, we tend to hug or caress. When giving comfort, we tend to curl together with someone’s chin on the other’s head. I’ve also found that I’m the only female-bodied individual in my group of friends that will take the protector role and curl around my lover as the “big spoon” when he needs to be cuddled, as opposed to being the one doing the cuddling. We pet, we poke, we nuzzle, we nip, and sometimes we even lick each other if we’re in a playful mood.

Unfortunately, I’ve found that our physicality tends to bother some of our friends. We’ve been scolded for doing sexual things, even when it wasn’t sexual for either of us. Once, we were play wrestling during a break in the action while watching a wrestling event on TV with a group of our friends, and they asked us to stop because they didn’t want to watch us be sexual. I understand where they’re coming from in a society that sexualizes every touch, but we as a society could really afford to look at how we view touch in relation to sexuality. Not every touch is intended as an invitation to sex.

I feel like we, as a society, by putting a taboo on sex have also put a taboo on touch. It would improve the health of our society as a cohesive whole if we could let go of the association between touch and sex that we’ve developed and become more comfortable touching each other casually. Gone would be the angry glare when you reach out to steady a stranger who’s tripped, or the refusal of help if you offer a hand to help someone up. We’d finally be able to let go of the paranoia that everyone who offers a friendly hand wants something more, and that would mean a more open and friendly society.

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