Touch

The World Cup final between France and Argentina last year was thrilling – even for someone who watches little football. I was intrigued to see how open the team players were physically, embracing and kissing each other at key moments. It seemed so healthy, so natural – and so rare. Because in almost any other sphere of life outside of sport, touching people is, at best, frowned upon, often greeted with suspicion and can even be dangerous. Touch is so often ambiguous. The person touching and the person being touched may see the gesture in quite different ways. It’s very easy for misunderstandings to occur.

I’ve noticed over the past 20 years it has become so difficult to express any emotion in a physical way. Nowadays there is so much fear around touch that people have become inhibited, wary, sometimes accusatory - just at the moment when we have become more litigious too. Sometimes the smallest gesture can have major repercussions – the media pick up on this endlessly (the Australian prime minister touching the Queen’s back, Trump holding Theresa May’s hand, and May having to call her husband to assure him nothing untoward was going on between her and Trump!). In the office when I started working as a subeditor, work mates would feel relaxed about putting their arm on someone’s shoulder, even giving someone a hug. Nowadays you would probably be reported if you did something like that. We are so very determined to protect our personal space. Perhaps this is a good thing. Perhaps it saves us from the ambiguity of touch – easier and clearer not to get close. But I do sometimes wonder if our physical distance from each other is also a brake on deeper encounters. That it stops us from engaging with each other except in a perfunctory way. And our encounters with others are now more often than not not physical face to face meetings but online, distanced echos.

I’ve noticed in my massage practice that things I used to take for granted, I now have to explain. I’m ok with that. I’ve always asked people to tell me if there is anything they don’t like as I work on them because I know that touch is ambiguous and what I do physically can be misinterpreted. I explain what I will do, then ask them to tell me immediately if for any reason they feel uncomfortable. I check in with them throughout the massage to make sure they’re ok. This seems to me to be correct and normal. What perhaps isn’t so normal is that I see more clients these days who seem not to know what they want. And it has become harder for me to know what they want from me.

We nearly all need to touch and be touched. Look at how crowds will reach out to try to touch someone they admire or are spellbound by. A pop star or a famous football star or a charismatic religious or political leader – you’ll see them mobbed by their admirers all wanting to touch them.

The disaster of covid has made touch all the more fraught with fear. For long months we were told not to hug one another, not even to touch one another. Keep your distance – as if the Brits needed any further incentive! What did this do to our mental health? How did it change the way we interact with each other? I think it has led to a lot of confusion. Touching became transgressive.

Alongside the powerful inhibitions that covid forced upon us, there was a growing fear that sexual assault was everywhere – in the media, in sports, among MPs, on film sets, even among the police. Everyone was guilty. We had to be suspicious of colleagues, those who served us, those who approached us, even those we went to voluntarily. The MeToo movement, positive in many ways though it has been, also brought with it a frenzy of publicity and an environment of accusation and fear.

In such circumstances, simple affection or remedial touch can both easily be misinterpreted. The colleague who touches another because he wishes to express empathy with another or the physical therapist who must by definition be physical, can both find themselves in trouble.

We long to touch and be touched – the elderly especially, who are so rarely touched – but we have lost our way and getting close is too difficult, so we retreat to the self-isolating imprisonment of our smart phones. But touch can heal and touch can make us feel a part of the world which is, as well as being spiritual, also tactile.    

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