Watch a small child reach for you, arms raised, face open, wanting nothing more than to be held. There is no calculation in that reach. No favour being asked, no debt being created. The child simply wants your arms around them, and the moment they are there, something in them settles.
Someone once told me that you will never quite feel loved in the same way again as you do when your child is that small, asking for nothing but closeness. It stayed with me because there is something deeply true in it. Touch is one of the first languages we learn, and one of the first ways we come to recognise love.
Unfortunately, not everyone gets to experience this. Some children reach out and are met with distraction, discomfort, or nothing at all. They grow into adults who never learned what it feels like to be held in that simple, uncomplicated way. That is not a flaw in them. It is a gap left by circumstance. And luckily gaps like that can still be filled later, through the steady presence of a partner, a friend, a therapist, or anyone patient enough to help the body learn something it never had the chance to learn on its own.
Children grow, though, and something shifts. There is a day, and nobody marks it at the time, when a child lets go of your hand before you reach the school gate. Then the hugs get shorter. Then some of them get skipped altogether. Nobody decides for this to happen. It simply tapers off, and most of us never think to start it up again.
Touch works before we learn to speak, and it keeps working long after words fail us. The body is built for it, in a fairly literal sense.
Built for contact
Our skin contains a set of nerve fibres that are particularly responsive to slow, gentle touch. Scientists call them C-tactile afferents. In 2009, researchers led by Line Löken found that these fibres respond most strongly when touch moves across the skin at around 1 to 10 centimetres per second, which closely matched the speed people rated as most pleasant (Löken et al., 2009). That is roughly the pace of a hand moving slowly along an arm or fingers moving through hair. Move much faster or slower, and both the neural response and the reported pleasantness tend to decrease.
These fibres are found primarily in hairy skin rather than on the palms and appear to be specialised for the kind of gentle touch we experience as a caress. That may help explain why certain forms of touch feel rewarding and encourage closeness between people. When C-tactile afferents are stimulated, activity has been observed in the insular cortex, a region involved in emotion and awareness of the body's internal state, while the areas typically associated with discriminative touch respond differently (Olausson et al., 2002).
The body responds to touch in other ways too, although the evidence is narrower than many popular articles suggest. Much of the research comes from massage and other forms of structured touch, rather than something as ordinary as a hug at the front door.
Dr Tiffany Field has run the Touch Research Institute in Miami since 1992. Across decades of research, studies from the institute have found that moderate-pressure massage can lower cortisol, heart rate and blood pressure, while increasing serotonin, dopamine and some immune markers (Field, 2014). These are real findings, supported across multiple studies.
But there is an important distinction. What the research shows about massage cannot simply be transferred to every form of touch. Nobody has established that a quick squeeze on the way past produces the same physiological effects. And then there is oxytocin, the hormone almost every article about touch reaches for. The evidence there is considerably thinner. In Field's review, the claim rests on a single study.
Why we pulled away
If touch does all this, why do so many adults get so little of it?
Part of the answer is cultural, though there is no single pattern everywhere. A 2021 survey of more than 14,000 people across 45 countries found that the amount of affectionate touch people share with partners, friends and children varies with where they live. It was more common in warmer countries, in less conservative ones and, contrary to what many might expect, in more religious ones (Sorokowska et al., 2021). A separate study comparing the UK and Japan found that both cultures adjusted how much touch people welcomed according to the closeness of the relationship, in strikingly similar ways, although UK participants generally rated social touch as more pleasant (Suvilehto et al., 2019).
Some of us simply grew up somewhere touch was rare. That absence can become a quiet norm, passed from one generation to the next without anyone consciously choosing it.
Part of the answer is simpler: screens. A phone call, a text and a video chat can carry information, affection and connection. None of them carry weight, warmth or the particular sensation of skin against skin. As more of daily life moved onto screens, the body continued to ask for something a screen cannot provide.
And part of the answer is fear. Over the past few decades, teachers, carers and healthcare professionals have become more cautious about touching the people in their care. Some schools adopted no-touch rules. Some foster-care guidelines placed restrictions on physical affection between carers and children. That caution did not come from nowhere. It grew partly from real cases of harm, and consent matters more than any of the older, looser assumptions about touch ever did.
In South Africa, there is another layer to this. By the time I started teaching, corporal punishment had been unlawful for close to a decade. Section 10 of the South African Schools Act is clear: no person may administer corporal punishment at a school to a learner (Republic of South Africa, 1996). That change was necessary. There is no ambiguity about that.
But in the years that followed, I noticed something else becoming less clear: where the boundary sat between harmful touch and ordinary, appropriate physical comfort. Teachers became very conscious of what they could not do. There was less conversation about what safe, wanted touch could still look like.
In the primary school where I taught, children would come up and hug you without thinking about it, and as far as I know, they still do. In high schools, the caution seemed more pronounced. A hand on a shoulder, a hug after a difficult moment, even standing close to a distressed learner could feel more complicated. Not because these things were necessarily wrong, but because nobody wanted to cross a line they could not clearly see.
That caution has a good reason behind it. Children need boundaries, teachers need boundaries, and consent matters. But there is a difference between removing harmful touch and becoming afraid of touch altogether. Somewhere between the two, ordinary human comfort can get lost.
What gets lost
There is a term for the experience of wanting more affectionate touch than you are getting: affection deprivation. Kory Floyd has spent years studying what tends to accompany it. People who report less satisfying physical affection also tend to report more loneliness, depression, stress and anxiety, along with poorer overall health (Floyd, 2014). Other research has linked affection deprivation with greater physical pain and poorer sleep, including difficulty falling asleep and greater tiredness the following day (Floyd, 2016).
These are associations, not proof that a lack of touch causes any of these things. People who are lonely, stressed or struggling with their health may also be less likely to receive or seek physical affection.
None of this is an argument for touching people who have not welcomed it. It is an argument for noticing what can be missing when wanted touch disappears from a person's life.
More than one kind of touch
Part of what goes missing is simply range. Touch is not only romantic, and researchers distinguish between different kinds of touch. Functional touch serves a practical purpose: a handshake, a hand steadying someone on the stairs, a nurse checking a pulse. Affective touch serves no task beyond connection: a hug, holding hands, an arm around someone's shoulders.
Between those two ends is a wide range of ordinary contact that many of us rarely think about. A hand on a friend's arm during a difficult conversation. A longer hug than usual at the end of a visit. Holding a parent's hand while they talk. These small moments do not need to be dramatic to matter. Sometimes they are simply a physical way of saying, I am here.
Self-touch belongs in the picture too, although it is not a substitute for human contact. Wrapping your arms around yourself, rubbing your shoulders or placing a hand over your chest during a stressful moment can provide pressure, warmth and a physical cue of safety when there is nobody else to offer it.
It doesn't take much
None of it has to be dramatic to count. A 2023 study of 7 880 people across 37 countries found that partners who stroked, hugged and kissed each other more reported greater love in their relationships. The association remained after researchers accounted for factors including age, gender, religiosity, conservatism and relationship length (Sorokowska et al., 2023). Ordinary contact, not grand gestures.
Barbara Fredrickson has a name for one of the processes that may help explain why these small moments matter. She calls it _positivity resonance_: brief moments in which two people share a positive emotion, their physiology becomes more synchronised, and each person genuinely cares about the other's wellbeing (Fredrickson, 2013). All three elements matter. Two people laughing at the same joke, without any sense of warmth or mutual care, is not quite the same thing.
Her argument is that these micro-moments, rather than only the big romantic set pieces, help build connection over time. A quick hug, a shared laugh with a hand on an arm, or holding someone's gaze and hand for a few seconds longer than usual can all create an opportunity for one.
There is something hopeful about that. These moments do not require a special occasion, a perfect relationship or a grand declaration. They can happen anywhere, for free. And over the years, those small moments can become part of what it means to live with other people rather than merely near them.
Bringing it back
None of this is about forcing touch on anyone. But where it is welcome, a few small habits can make room for more of it.
- Don't let go so fast. When researchers compared hug lengths, one-second hugs were rated clearly less pleasant than five- or ten-second ones. Five and ten felt about the same, so there is no magic number to reach. The point is simply not to let go before the other person is ready (Dueren et al., 2021).
- Ask, then touch. "Can I give you a hug?" or "Would you like me to hold your hand?" keeps touch wanted rather than assumed.
- Build small daily anchors. A hand held over coffee, a hug at the door, a shoulder squeeze when someone finishes a difficult task. Small and frequent can matter more than rare, elaborate gestures.
- Don't skip the people who get touched least. Grandparents, people living alone and young children can go long periods without affectionate contact. A regular visit that includes a welcome hug, where it is wanted, may offer something a gift cannot.
- Use self-touch when no one else is near. Wrapping your arms around yourself, rubbing your shoulders, taking a warm bath or slowly applying moisturiser can give the body pressure, warmth and sensory input when another person is not there.
- Consider professional touch. Massage is not merely an indulgence. This is one area where the research base is comparatively strong, with studies linking massage with changes in stress, pain and mood (Field, 2014).
- If touch feels unfamiliar, let someone teach you slowly. Growing up without much affection does not mean you are incapable of receiving it now. Comfort with touch can develop later, at a pace that feels safe, with someone patient enough to respect your boundaries.
Touch asks for very little, and sometimes gives back something difficult to put into words: the physical sense that you are not alone. The same reach a child makes without a second thought, arms up, wanting only to be held, is one of the earliest ways we learn that another person can be a place of safety and comfort.
Adults need that kind of connection too. Some of us have simply forgotten how to ask for it. Others never got the chance to learn. Either way, it is not too late.
Bibliography
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