I've been thinking about the complications of touching one another.
Not everyone likes to touch other people or be touched by them, but I do. From my earliest childhood until this morning, touch is essential to my important relationships.
I was touched a lot when I was a child. My mother had a welcoming lap, hugged me full-on several times a day, and rubbed my back (“rubbies, Mummy, rubbies”) as I fell asleep. My aunts also had laps and mother-like hugs. Throughout my growing-up I wrestled with my cousins and friends, and for a semester shared a twin bed with my cousin John when he was a high-school linebacker and I was a varsity basketball player.
On the other hand, from the time I was a year old, I got spanked by my parents and, when appropriate, by the same aunts. Later, into my teens, my dad smacked me unexpectedly, the only touch I remember as abusive. I hated to be spanked, and hated even more getting smacked, so I never touched my children or grandchildren like this, and counsel anyone who asks to never, ever physically hurt a child.
When puberty arrived with its storm of sexual impulses, touching became fraught. I stopped hugging my guy friends; the teenage social warning system in Hollywood, where I grew up, sent alarms that touching one another was a sign that one or both of us might be gay. The church youth program I was imbedded in told me I shouldn’t do what my newly-insistent drives longed to do: touch myself, stare at girl’s body parts and, if and when possible, touch them. I was fraught with confusion about touch and stumbled through my teens and into my twenties honoring and dishonoring boundaries in an erratic pattern.
Becky and I have been married for nearly sixty years, and touching has been an important and changing experience in our relationship since its earliest days. In decades of close friendships, and in professional relationships with parishioners and therapy clients, I’ve listened to and learned about the incredible variations in partners’ experiences of touching and not touching, including how touching expresses itself in sexual contact. I know contented couples who long ago gave up touching one another for sex, and young couples (not so surprising) and couples in their sixties and seventies (surprising!) who have sexual intercourse every day.
What I conclude from all of this is that there is no normal way to touch, no normal pattern of whether or how or how often couples are sexually intimate. It is the two of us figuring out our own experiences, and then creating our own routines and boundaries to fulfill our desires. As I’ve often written, the most important form of intercourse, on which physical, emotional, mindful, and spiritual intercourse are based, is the frequent conversations in which we talk honestly, listen carefully, with insatiable curiosity about our partner. It is in these open dialogues that we create the basis for all our expressions of intimacy.
Many, perhaps most of us have been raised with inhibitions about too much touching. Just mention of the subject makes many of us queasy, as if it’s a danger zone for our thoughts and behavior. So we inhibit ourselves, and often restrain from touching one another. In a majority of cultures around the world, people touch more than most of us do. Many foreign populations are more often bumping shoulders in densely crowded spaces. Entire families, often multigenerational, live in one or two rooms and sleep next to one another. Many cultures have social routines of hugging and kissing when they meet in public, a more tactile greeting than nodding and shaking hands. Semi-nudity is a more frequent experience for children and adults than most of us experience growing up. In general, we seem less expressive physically and more cautious about the implications of touching.
The good news is that in some circumstances, we're touching more. Here are a few examples:
Just since the 1970s and 1980s, touch has become an essential protocol in caring for tiny, premature newborns, which I’ve learned from our pediatrician daughter. When possible, Neonatal Intensive Care Unit doctors and nurses now touch the tiniest premature infants frequently and, when they’re strong enough, lay them skin-to-skin on their mother’s chest. From their earliest moments, touch gives these tiny babies a better chance to thrive.
A nurse at a nearby hospital spent hours caring for a post-operative teenage girl whose fearful agitation kept her body from quieting into its healing process. When medications and visits from her family failed to calm her, the nurse closed the door to the girl’s room, crawled up next to her on her hospital bed, and carefully held her until she settled herself.
For end-of-life care, hospice volunteers have developed appropriate ways to touch dying patients through their final days. They teach family members to caress the unconscious dying person, to gently hug their Beloveds whether or not there is an obvious response. It may seem uncomfortably intimate, but holding and kissing a dying person sends messages even near the end of their lives that they are loved.
These examples all come from medical circumstances and involve people trained in how to touch their patients. Touch is more complicated when we’re dealing with non-medical social situations, and even more so when we're confronting deeply ingrained cultural or religious stories about ourselves.
I was introduced for the first time to a community of gay men and lesbians in the 1970s. By the time the AIDS epidemic irrupted in the 1980s I knew enough from my own wariness to recognize that straight men were frightened by the possibility of infection from any close contact with gay men. Also, what I learned as a pubescent boy was now confirmed time and again, that straight men feared that any act of intimacy with another man, gay or straight, might lead to suspicion about their own gayness, or might lead other straight men to suspect them of being gay.
Anything beyond a handshake – any hugging or kissing – might ignite the fear of infection or of their own gayness. As a sad consequence of these and other fears and suspicions, a plurality of men shares almost no touch with one another. When touch is limited to sex with our partners, it eliminates tactile pleasures and emotional connections for straight men that routine hugging and kissing might introduce into our friendships.
During those plague years, one gay friend greeted me in the crowd on the lawn after church and quite naturally hugged me and just as naturally kissed me; I kissed him back. I realized immediately that our intimacy signaled that I was not afraid of contracting AIDS from him, nor concerned that someone might suspect me of being gay because of the intimacy of our friendship. So I began to kiss my closest male friends, gay and straight, and to be kissed back by them. This intimate way of touching has become as natural as shaking hands, as routine as the most casual hug, as recent as dinner with friends last evening. Such touch is a witness to our affection, not a reason for fear or suspicion.
But let’s be honest: for many of us, there are certain deeply ingrained beliefs and habits that we have to work our way past if touch is to become a healthier, more pleasurable, more frequent expression of our affections. These inhibiting convictions are the product of millennia of cultural and religious history. I believe they stand in the way of creating a human family in which we recognize that all of us are created equal and wherein we belong to one another. Perhaps we will move toward resolving these inhibitions by the time my great-grandchildren are adults. But we cannot wait until then to address and begin to overcome these fallacies.
We have a lot of work to do to resolve our confusion about touch. But this much is already clear: despite the lies we have been told for centuries, each of us has a right to define for ourselves what is appropriate in the way we want to touch and be touched.
Over time, I've identified some of the false beliefs that our culture perpetuates, and seen the damage these beliefs can do in peoples' lives. Maybe you recognize some or all of these from your own experience:
THE LIE: In straight intimate relationships, men are ultimately in charge and women should be responsive to their authority.
INSTEAD: Men and women share responsibility for creating their relationship, each with an equal voice and shared authority in the conversation. No one should bully their way into leadership, nor should anyone abdicate responsibility for their own agency with real or feigned helplessness.
THE LIE: Sexually, men have needs and are entitled to touch and be touched by women, who have obligations to meet these needs.
INSTEAD: No one is entitled to anyone else's body. Both men and women have needs and obligations, and figuring out how to navigate these is the work of every individual and every intimate relationship.
THE LIE: Straight people are normal, LGBTQ people are abnormal; therefore, straight sex is natural and normal, and LGBTQ sex is unnatural.
INSTEAD: Most people are normal, whether straight or queer, and we each exist on a vast spectrum of possibilities for expressing our sexuality. The tremendous variation among people means that sex, in whatever form or fashion seems best to a couple, can be a normal, healthy expression of love.
THE LIE: Some people of color, especially Black people, are unable to control their sexual desires. White people are more appropriately self-controlled.
INSTEAD: Stereotypes of race and sexuality are the heritage of a society that enslaved people, and they are dehumanizing, wrong, and deeply racist, allowing for the ongoing mistreatment of Black people by white people. Levels of sexual desire and expression vary from person to person, regardless of race, and our task is to find ways to express our desires that suit us as partners.
We have a lot of work to do to resolve our confusion about touch. But this much is already clear: despite the lies we have been told for centuries, each of us has a right to define for ourselves what is appropriate in the way we want to touch and be touched.