Touchy About Touch

The bad news is that this post isn’t going to be very popular. The good news is that it doesn’t matter… it’s just me expressing an opinion, lol!

I’m going to go out on a ledge and make a claim that almost all of us raised in a western, liberal, open, and modern society have been desensitized from the intimacy of being physically touched. We’re raised in co-ed schools from a young age, we play with children of the opposite sex growing up, we are expected to have girlfriends and boyfriends before we even reach puberty, we shake hands and give hugs to say hello and goodbye to our friends and acquaintances, we have multiple relationships by the time we’re out of high school, most people in the world have lost their virginity before their 18, etc., etc. By the way, I think the average age in America for losing your virginity is something like 15 or 16.

We’re so desensitized to touch, that we don’t have an inkling to what being sensitive to touch even is! Touch hasn’t just lost its meaning, it’s lost its power and lost its value! Once, being touched was an act of relationship, an act of closeness, and an act of intimacy. Today, there are people that will sleep with someone they just met and barely know! The sensitivity of touch isn’t the only thing we’ve banished from our lives… we’ve also banished intimacy itself!

How does the desensitization to physical touch affect our relationship to our husbands and wives? Would being sensitive to touch improve my relationship? How can I ever re-sensitize?

I want to share one quick story from my life. I was seriously involved with someone from my junior year in high school through my first couple years of University. When our relationship ended, it was very painful for me. I learned from this relationship that I wasn’t interested in having casual or directionless dating relationships with women. What I wanted was a serious relationship and I wanted that serious relationship to head towards marriage. In a fit of inspiration, I decided that I wouldn’t sleep with another woman and try not to even touch another woman until I got married! Crazy, huh? Lol! Well, it’s crazier than that… because I didn’t meet my wife until many years later! Those were some difficult years, to say the least!

Why am I telling you this? I’m telling you this because when I finally did touch my wife, and we’re talking about the first time I held her hand, it wasn’t just exciting… it was EROTIC! Lol! These years of not touching women made me super sensitive to touch.

If you’re married it won’t be easy re-sensitizing yourself to touch because you’re hopefully constantly touching your wife. What I would recommend, though, would be to make your touch something special for your wife, which means only your wife. Dedicate your touch to her.

What does this entail? For a husband, like myself, it means not touching other women, including no handshakes and hugging hello and goodbye to friends and acquaintances. If you want to touch someone, touch your wife… be aroused by your wife… and stop enjoying touching other women.

By doing this, touch will come to have greater significance, it will become something of intimacy between you and your wife, it will become a compliment to your wife, and it will make your wife feel more secure in your relationship to you. It may even make you touch your wife more!

I’m sure this idea won’t be very popular, but I can’t see a single negative consequence in regards to your relationship with your wife. Your wife might even admit one day that watching you body hug her best friend made her slightly uncomfortable, to say the least!