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Being shown love through touch is a basic need for every person. Babies need to be shown physical affection to develop healthily; without it they will fail to thrive.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta clearly understood the importance of touch. Whenever she was with people, whether they were babies, children or old people dying of incurable diseases, she would hold them, stroke them, caress them. She knew that touch can often communicate love more effectively than words.
Physical affection is a powerful communicator in marital love, and not just as a prelude to making love. As Gary Chapman puts it, ‘To touch my body is to touch me. To withdraw from my body is to distance yourself from me emotionally.’2 For those who feel loved through touch, hugs can sort out all the problems of the week, while a lack of them causes isolation, emptiness and a deep sense of rejection. If we have grown up in a family where physical affection was lacking, the practice of showing love in this way will almost certainly need to be learnt. And it is important to understand that if one of us has been denied physical affection while the other has not, it may cause some initial awkwardness. But persevere!
In marriage, the touch of love can take many forms: holding hands, an arm around the shoulder or waist, a kiss, a hug, a brush of the body as you pass, a back massage, as well as the variety and richness of arousing each other as a prelude to making love.
Sila:
I love holding hands with Nicky when we are walking together. Although I know there are certain situations when he would not do that naturally, he has learnt that some embarrassment on his part is worth it to have a wife who feels loved.
He also knows from years of experience that if I’m anxious or worried, the best thing he can do is to take me in his arms, hug me, hold me and kiss me tenderly, at which point my worries feel much less overwhelming!
Both sexual and non-sexual touch have their place, but we should recognise that men and women generally function quite differently in this area. For many women, much of their desire for physical touch stems from their need for emotional connection through being shown affection. By contrast, many men are quickly aroused by physical touch and see it as part of sexual foreplay.
These different ways of responding can become a vicious circle. If a wife does not feel emotionally connected, she will often shut out her husband sexually. And if she is not sexually responsive, the last thing he feels like is connecting at an emotional level. All too often the result is a stalemate. This is often where the sexual relationship starts to wane. We need to recognise what is happening, talk about it and then agree how to help each other break this negative pattern.
For some people, there is a fine line between their desire for sex and their longing for physical affection. The two cannot be easily separated.
Matt and Penny, a couple on The Marriage Course, were experiencing great tension after the birth of their second child. Penny did not feel like making love, while Matt became frustrated and tried to persuade her. She stopped touching him at all in case he took it as an encouragement to have sex. The more he wanted sex, the less she did, and the less she did, the more he did. And so they spiralled down in misery. Matt was confused, not understanding why his wife didn’t want him. As touch is his primary way of feeling loved, he felt undervalued and unloved.
Meanwhile Penny felt hurt and angry and interpreted his persistence as insensitivity, thinking he was ignoring her emotional turmoil. The result was that they were locked into a cycle of hurting and blaming each other and had no physical contact at all.
Eventually, they sought help. As a result of hearing Penny describe to a third party how she felt, Matt apologised to her for putting his needs above hers, and she forgave him. He then backed off sexually for about two months. This was an important sign to Penny that he meant his apology, and it allowed time for the hurt to heal. As a result, she began to open up to him again. With the lines of communication cleared, they could draw close and start to touch each other again without fear of misunderstanding. Soon Penny was able to accept Matt’s advances and even make a few of her own.
If physical affection is our husband’s or wife’s primary love language, at a time of crisis, holding and hugging them will communicate how much we care. Those gentle, tender touches will be remembered long after the crisis has passed.
There are few things more important in marriage than discovering what makes our husband or wife feel loved and then making the effort to love them in this way, remembering that their needs may well alter over time and under different circumstances. Rather than trying to change our partner, we must accept their needs and learn to communicate love accordingly.
Do you know which is your partner’s first love language? How about your own? The starting point is to talk together about what each of us does or fails to do that makes the other feel most loved or most neglected.
Don’t put it off! It may lead to a surprising discovery about your partner.
Nicky and Sila Lee; The Marriage Book
