What it means to be ‘touch starved’

1 week ago 1

By Christina Caron

The New York Times

Allora Dannon, 35, an author who lives in Rochester, N.Y., longed for physical touch for much of her adult life.

As a “romantic late bloomer” who didn’t begin dating until she was 32, she said she ached for someone to hold her. Not a “meaningless brush” with another body, she said, but the type of touch that had “intention behind it.”

This wasn’t a yearning for sex. She wanted someone to hold hands with, someone lightly touching the small of her back, a person to cuddle with on the couch. Sometimes she would sob, wondering why it seemed so easy for other people to be touched but so difficult for her. When Dannon shared her longing for companionship on social media, her account eventually drew nearly 120,000 followers on TikTok.

Being touch-starved, or lacking wanted physical connection, has become increasingly common in our fast-paced, digital world, experts say. And a lack of touch can affect both our physical and mental well-being.

Without regular touch, we can feel “lonely, anxious, stressed or emotionally depleted without immediately knowing why,” said Ozge Ugurlu, a postdoctoral researcher in the department of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Ugurlu and other experts on touch explained why touch is so vital and why they think people aren’t getting enough of it.