Touching, and the Need Adult Life Has No Channel For

Consider an ordinary week. You speak to colleagues, answer messages, sit across from people at meals, ride trains pressed against strangers, and are touched with intention by nobody at all. Not once. This is not a dramatic fact about your week. For a very large number of adults it is simply the shape of the week, repeated, and it passes without being registered because there is no moment at which anything is withheld. Nothing is refused. There was never an offer.

It was not always the shape. In childhood, being touched was infrastructure. A child is carried, held, patted, hauled about, has a hand taken at a road crossing and a back rubbed in the dark. None of it is requested. A child does not have to build a case for it, and would not be able to. It is simply the ambient condition of being small.

Then, at some point that nobody announces, the supply stops. If there is a partner, that one person becomes the entire channel. In some settings a close friend or a family member carries part of it. Beyond that there is nothing: no arrangement, no occasion, no form of words that a person can use to ask another adult for contact without the request being heard as something else entirely.

A book published in 1971 gave this stoppage a name and called it a deficit rather than an adjustment. It is Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin, by the anthropologist Ashley Montagu. What follows is not a summary of it. It is an argument about the thing the book names, about the reason adult life has no legitimate channel for that thing, and about why the resulting hunger is so reliably mistaken for three other conditions. And because this house sells an evening in which a person is touched with attention, the argument is one we profit from. That is declared here, at the top, rather than discovered by a reader at the bottom.

Ashley Montagu, who lived from 1905 to 1999, was an anthropologist. Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin was first published by Columbia University Press in 1971. A second edition followed in 1978 and a third in 1986, both through Harper and Row, and the third is substantially longer than the first. A Japanese translation appeared as Tatchingu, subtitled in Japanese as contact between parent and child, translated by Sato Nobuyuki and Sato Masayo and published by Heibonsha in 1977, with later printings.

The book gathers a large amount of material from anthropology, developmental psychology, physiology and clinical observation around a single organising claim: that tactile experience is not a pleasant extra laid on top of development, but one of its conditions. Montagu treats the skin as the body’s largest organ and as the earliest sensory system to develop, and he reads the whole of the material as saying that what happens at that surface early in life is not decorative.

From there the book makes a second move, and this is the one that still does work. It argues that the amount of tactile contact a person receives is not set by need but by culture. Different societies license wildly different quantities of adult physical contact, and within any one society the licensing is further sorted by age, by relationship and by sex. A need that does not vary is being met by an arrangement that varies enormously, and Montagu treats the gap between the two as the interesting object.

The book was written in and for mid-century America, and it is polemical. It has a case to make and it makes it hard. Read as a period document with a thesis, it is illuminating. Read as a current account of what is known about touch, it is not usable, and the next section says why in specific terms rather than as a general caution.

A publication that recommends a book has an obligation to say where it has aged, and this one has aged in two different ways that need separating.

The first is ordinary and forgivable. The book is more than fifty years old. Whole fields it draws on have moved: the physiology of cutaneous sensation, the developmental literature, the study of stress. Claims that were reasonable syntheses in 1971 have in places been refined, qualified or replaced, and a reader has no way of telling from the page which is which. Nothing in this essay rests on an empirical claim taken from the book. Where something is asserted here about touch and the body, it comes from a modern peer-reviewed source and is attributed, and it is stated as an association or a proposal rather than as an effect.

The second has nothing to do with the passage of time. Among the book’s most cited exhibits is the work of Harry Harlow on infant rhesus macaques, in which infant monkeys were separated from their mothers and given surrogates, and in which deprivation and isolation were deliberately imposed and their consequences recorded. Those experiments are ethically indefensible. That is this Library’s own judgement and it is stated without hedging: animals capable of distress were made to suffer severely, over long periods, to demonstrate something about attachment that the researchers were substantially confirming rather than discovering.

The historian of science Marga Vicedo, writing in the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences in 2009, traced how Harlow’s work on primate love travelled from the laboratory into legend, acquiring along the way a settled cultural meaning that is not identical to what the experiments could support. That is a useful corrective in itself. A study can be famous, frequently reproduced in textbooks, and still be carrying more interpretive weight than it was ever able to bear.

So the position here is precise. The macaque material should not be used as evidence for anything in this essay, and it is not. It is not cited as support for the claim that touch matters to human adults, and no reader should take from these pages that a case about human need has been proved by what was done to those animals. Montagu’s book remains worth reading for its structural argument about culture and permission. It is not a source of current science, and anybody recommending it as one is misrepresenting it.

Here is the distinction the book keeps and the culture collapses, and almost everything difficult about this subject follows from the collapse.

Touch is a broad category. It includes a hand on a forearm to steady somebody, a hug at an airport, a head resting against a shoulder on a late train, hair being washed, a back being rubbed, two people sitting close enough that their arms are in contact for an hour. Sexual touch is one region inside that category, distinguished by intent and by what it is understood to initiate. The two are not the same size and they do not have the same purpose.

In contemporary adult life, however, they are treated as one. The practical rule that most adults operate under, without having been taught it explicitly, is that sustained physical contact between adults either is sexual, is a prelude to sex, or is a mistake. There is no fourth category with a name and a script. Which means that an adult who wants the first kind and has no access to it has only two available moves: acquire a romantic partner, or do without.

The consequence is a specific and very common confusion, and it runs in both directions. A person who is short of touch and reaches for the only available channel will read their own condition as a sex drive, because sex is the thing the culture has made the socially legible container for contact. And a person who notices that what they actually want is to be held, not to have sex, will often conclude that something is wrong with them, because the want they are having has no recognised shape.

There is now some empirical literature that treats the distinction as real rather than rhetorical. A 2014 review in Neuron by Francis McGlone, Johan Wessberg and Hakan Olausson proposes that, alongside the discriminative system that tells you what you are holding and how hard, a class of unmyelinated C fibres in hairy skin constitutes a neurobiological substrate for the affective and rewarding properties of touch, and the authors set this out as an account of why touch matters in social communication. That is a proposal about mechanism in a peer-reviewed review. It is not a claim that touch treats anything, and nothing in this essay should be read as one. But it does mean that when somebody says being touched is not the same as sex, they are not being coy. They are pointing at something the research literature also finds it useful to separate.

Take the two previous sections together and the structure of the problem becomes visible, and it is a structural problem rather than a personal one.

For a child, touch is supplied without being requested. For an adult, touch is available through exactly one sanctioned route, the romantic partnership, and that route is not distributed according to who needs contact. It is distributed by attraction, luck, timing, geography, the accidents of who is single in a given decade, and a great many other things that have nothing to do with the underlying need. Some people have a surplus of it. Some people have had none in a decade and are not unusual in any way that would explain it.

Notice how strange this arrangement is once stated plainly. There is a widely distributed human want. There is one legitimate way to satisfy it. That way is allocated by a process that does not track the want at all. And people who fall outside the allocation are not offered a second route; they are offered a diagnosis.

Which is why touch hunger is so consistently misnamed. It is read as loneliness, and it overlaps with loneliness but is not identical to it: a person can have friends they speak to daily, a full calendar, a family they are close to, and still not have been held in three years. It is read as a sex drive, for the reasons given above, which leads people into arrangements they did not actually want and leaves the original condition untouched. And it is read as a personal failing, as evidence of neediness or of having failed at the ordinary adult task of acquiring a partner, which is the reading that causes the most damage because it converts a structural gap into a fault in the person standing in it.

One modern study is worth naming here, carefully. Von Mohr, Kirsch and Fotopoulou, writing in Royal Society Open Science in 2021, surveyed a large sample during COVID-19 restrictions and report that deprivation of intimate touch during that period was associated with higher self-reported anxiety and greater loneliness, and that how strongly people craved touch varied with individual differences in attachment style. That is a cross-sectional, self-reported association measured under extraordinary conditions. It establishes no causal direction and it is not evidence that touch remedies anything. What it does establish is narrower and still useful: this is a thing researchers can measure, which means it is not a private eccentricity.

Montagu wrote from mid-century America and generalised freely about national temperaments in a way that a careful reader now will want to hold at arm’s length. The underlying observation, that societies license different amounts of adult contact, is sound. The manner of stating it, as a set of characters that peoples have, is not, and it is worth being explicit about the difference before going near the Japanese case.

A tendency reported in a sample is not a national character. It describes what a group of people did on a questionnaire, in a particular decade, under particular conditions. It does not describe anybody individually, it does not describe a person reading this, and it does not license a sentence beginning with the words people in this country.

With that said, one recent study is directly relevant and is reported here as what it is. Suvilehto and colleagues, writing in Proceedings of the Royal Society B in 2019, compared a sample in the United Kingdom with a sample in Japan and asked participants which areas of the body they would allow various people in their lives to touch. The headline of the paper is a similarity, not a difference: in both samples, the strength of the emotional bond was linearly associated with the size of the permissible touch area. The same structure held in both places. Where the samples differed was in how pleasurable social touching was rated, with participants in the Japanese sample rating it lower than those in the United Kingdom sample.

That is a considerably more interesting result than the folk version, and it should be allowed to complicate rather than confirm. It does not say that one group needs less contact. It says the relational logic looks alike and the reported experience differs, and a difference in reported pleasantness can reflect many things, including how a question is understood and what a respondent takes social touching to mean.

The honest use of a finding like that is modest. It suggests that the amount of ordinary adult contact a person encounters is shaped by where they live and by what is done there, rather than being fixed by biology. It says nothing about any individual, and it certainly does not say that anybody should want less. A person whose surroundings supply very little non-romantic contact is not living in a place where the want has been abolished. They are living in a place where the channel is narrow.

It is not quite true that adults have no access to touch outside a partnership. There are channels. It is worth looking at what they have in common, because the common feature is the point.

The first is medical. A doctor, a nurse, a dentist, a physiotherapist all touch adults routinely and with permission. But medical touch is instrumental: it is directed at a part, for a purpose, and both parties understand it as procedure. It is also asymmetric in a specific way, in that the person being touched is a patient, which is a role that carries an implication of something being wrong.

The second is therapeutic or bodily-professional: massage, hairdressing, some forms of bodywork. This is closer to what people are missing, and it is not an accident that the massage industry is enormous. But it is bought, it is scheduled, it has a duration and a price, and it is governed by professional codes that exist precisely to keep the encounter from being anything other than what it says it is.

The third is commercial and newer. Professional cuddling services, in which a client pays for a session of non-sexual physical contact, have operated in Europe since around 2015. Patricia Santos, writing in Frontiers in Sociology in 2023, studied this industry through a three-year online ethnography with interviews and a review of press coverage, forums and practitioner websites, and reports that practitioners are frequently misunderstood as offering a front for prostitution and must manage unwanted advances, while the work itself enacts alternative scripts that decouple touch from sex. That is a qualitative study of a small and self-selecting group in one region. It does not establish how common such services are or what they do for anybody. It does establish that the misreading this essay has been describing is not hypothetical: people who explicitly organise their work around non-sexual touch spend a great deal of energy insisting on the distinction, because the culture keeps refusing it.

What all three channels share is that they are transactional, clinical, or both. Every one of them requires the person seeking touch to enter a role: patient, client, customer. None of them is a form of ordinary life. And that is not a criticism of the channels, which are doing exactly what they set out to do. It is an observation about what is left over. The thing an adult cannot get is uncommercial, unclinical, unscheduled contact that carries no implication of illness and no bill. That is available inside a partnership and, for some people, inside a close friendship, and it is available nowhere else at all.

Now the part that has to be said before the essay is allowed to sound persuasive.

This house sells private companionship. An evening here includes being touched with attention, and that is not incidental to what is purchased. Which means that every step of the argument above runs in our commercial favour. If touch is a need, this house supplies a need. If the need has no legitimate channel, this house is one of very few places it can go. If the hunger is being misread, this house is the party that reads it correctly. It would be difficult to design an argument more flattering to our own position, and the fact that it is also, we think, true, does not cancel that.

So here is what follows from the declaration, stated as constraints on what we may claim rather than as a disclaimer.

We do not claim that anybody is deficient. Nothing in this essay is a diagnosis, and a person who has not been touched in a long time is not thereby suffering from a condition. They are a person whose circumstances have not been supplying a thing that most people, most of the time, want.

We do not claim any outcome. Nothing here says that a paid evening treats loneliness, improves health, relieves anxiety or repairs anything at all. It would be easy money to say so and we do not say it, because it is not a claim we could support and because unfalsifiable promises are the standard mechanism by which people in this position get taken advantage of.

We do not claim to be the answer. What this house offers is bounded, scheduled and paid for, which places it in exactly the third category described in the previous section. It is transactional. It is not a friendship, it is not a partnership, and if it becomes the only place in a person’s life where she is touched without being a patient, that is not a success for us to celebrate. It is a description of a gap that an evening cannot close.

And we do not claim that the book is settled science. We have said at length that it is not. We are recommending a fifty-year-old polemic because its structural observation is good, while stating that its evidence is old and that one of its exhibits should never have been produced.

The objection worth taking seriously is not that the facts are wrong. It is that the framing is doing commercial work, and it runs as follows.

Calling touch a need medicalises ordinary loneliness. Loneliness is a normal condition of adult life, unevenly distributed and often temporary. Describing it in the vocabulary of deficiency and deprivation converts an ordinary human circumstance into something like a disorder, with a lack, a mechanism, a literature and, conveniently, a supplier. The manoeuvre is old and well understood: identify a universal human experience, name it as an unmet requirement, and a market appears where none existed. Everything this essay has done fits that template exactly, including the careful sourcing, which functions as a credential rather than as a check. And the sharpest version of the objection notes that the essay has been scrupulous about not claiming a therapeutic effect while constructing an argument whose entire force depends on the reader supplying that claim themselves.

A good deal of that lands, and the honest response is a narrowing rather than a rebuttal.

The narrowing is this. This essay does not claim that touch is a requirement in the sense that food is. It claims something weaker and more defensible: that the want is very widely distributed, that the supply is allocated by a mechanism unrelated to the want, and that the gap between those two facts is a structural feature of how adult life is organised rather than a defect in the people standing in the gap. That is a claim about arrangements, not about pathology. A person can accept all of it and conclude that they are perfectly fine, want nothing, and should close the page.

On the market point, the objection is simply correct and there is no answer that makes it go away. A market did appear. This house is in it. The only compensation available is to keep the interest visible where a reader can see it, to refuse the outcome claims that would make the market larger, and to state that the arrangement on offer is bounded and paid for rather than a relationship. That is not a rebuttal. It is what is left after the objection has taken what it is owed.

And on medicalising: the risk is real and the alternative is worse. The culture already supplies a description of the person who is short of touch, and it is neediness. Replacing a moral description with a structural one is not a neutral act, and it may well be self-serving in our case, but it is preferable to leaving in place a vocabulary whose only function is to make a person ashamed of an ordinary want.

This essay is analysis. It is not clinical guidance, it describes no treatment, it promises no outcome, and it diagnoses nobody. Nothing here should be read as saying that touch treats, relieves, cures or improves any condition.

Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin was first published in 1971 and is more than half a century old. Its empirical material is dated and in places superseded, and it is recommended here as a period argument about culture and permission rather than as a current account of what is known. Its use of Harry Harlow’s maternal-deprivation experiments on infant rhesus macaques is a serious problem with the book on its own terms, and those experiments are stated here to be ethically indefensible. No claim in this essay rests on them.

Every empirical statement above is taken from a modern peer-reviewed source, attributed in the text, and stated as an association or a proposal rather than as an established effect. The McGlone, Wessberg and Olausson review is cited for a proposed mechanism. The von Mohr, Kirsch and Fotopoulou survey is cited for a cross-sectional self-reported association measured under pandemic conditions, which establishes no causal direction. The Suvilehto study is cited for what two samples reported, and its principal finding is a similarity between them.

Nothing here is a statement about Japanese people, about Japanese reserve, or about national character of any kind. The cultural comparison reports what participants in two samples answered in one study. It does not describe any individual and no reader should take it as describing them.

The publication details of the book and of its Japanese translation are drawn from library and publisher records, and where editions are described the record is the source rather than an inspection of the volumes. No passage of the book is quoted anywhere in this essay.

This house’s commercial interest in the book’s premise is stated in the body rather than only here, because a declaration that appears after the argument has done its work is not a declaration. Neither the author, his estate, nor any publisher or researcher cited has any connection to this house, knows of it, or endorses it.