Platonic touch

What is platonic touch?

Platonic touch is physical contact without sexual intent: a hug, a hand on your back, sitting close together on the couch. It is about warmth and closeness, not about arousal or a step toward sex. Touch like this feeds the need for skin contact, even when nothing else happens.

What platonic touch looks like

Platonic touch is the hug when you meet again, the arm around a shoulder, or sitting together with your feet in someone’s lap. Take a woman who has lived alone for a long time and notices she no longer holds anyone: her body misses contact, while sex is not what she is after. That is exactly the gap platonic touch fills. It plays a part within a relationship too: partners who after years mostly touch only functionally sometimes miss the touch that serves nothing except being together. What is remarkable is that the skin has a system of its own for this kind of contact. Francis McGlone and colleagues describe in Neuron a separate class of nerve fibers, the C-tactile fibers, which respond to soft, slow, stroking touch and feel pleasant and social, apart from the nerves that register texture and pressure. So your skin is literally built for it. Those fibers send their signal to brain areas that deal with emotion and reward, not to the part that works out what you are touching. That explains why a slow stroke down your arm calms and connects, while the same skin barely registers a quick, businesslike touch as pleasant.

What platonic touch gives you

The gain from touch without sex is greater than people think. Brett Jakubiak and Brooke Feeney summarize the research in Personality and Social Psychology Review: affectionate touch promotes well-being on three fronts, in the relationship, psychologically and physically, partly because it dampens stress. In practice that means becoming calmer, feeling less alone and knowing yourself more connected. The body calms before the head grasps why. For a couple who do it together, there is also the feeling of being a team again instead of two people living past each other. For you, half an hour of being held can do more than an evening of talking. For a couple who have got stuck in sex, non-sexual touch can also be the way back: first learning again to relax at each other’s skin, without anything having to come of it. What it is not: a miracle cure or a replacement for everything you miss. And it only works when it is welcome; touch without consent does the opposite.

What platonic touch is not

“Touch always leads to sex.” No. Platonic touch is an end in itself; the warmth and calm are the point, not a stepping stone. The very fact that it does not have to lead anywhere makes it safe.

“Hugging is only for couples.” Not true. The need for skin contact stands apart from a relationship; friends, family and a professional setting too can provide it.

“If you have sex, you don’t need platonic touch.” They are different things. Many people with a busy sex life still miss the non-sexual closeness of simply being held.

What I see of it

In twenty-five years I have learned how often women actually come for this, even when they frame it as something else at first. The longest and most moving part of many meetings is not the sex, but lying together afterward, or sometimes before: a hand that stays, a body to fall against. Touch with no demand attached is, for many people, exactly what they miss most and dare to ask for least. I count it among the core of what I do, not the side program. What strikes me again and again is how timid the request for it often is, as if you had to apologize for simply wanting to be held. There is no need for that. It is one of the most ordinary and most underrated things a person needs, and there is no age or situation at which that suddenly stops being true.

What you can do yourself

• Ask for what you miss, even if it is “just” a hug. Saying that you need touch is not weakness; it is an ordinary human need.
• Agree that it does not have to lead anywhere. It is precisely the agreement that touch stays platonic that lets you relax.
• Seek out slow, warm touch. It is the soft, stroking movements your skin responds to most strongly, not the firm or fast kind.
• Respect the no of the other, and of yourself. Touch only counts when it is welcome; consent is the precondition, not a formality.

More reading on platonic touch

Within this glossary, skin hunger explains what happens when you get too little touch, and oxytocin which hormone is released during closeness. Beyond this site, the review by Jakubiak and Feeney gives a thorough picture of what affectionate touch does for adults.

Where this fits on this site

If you are after closeness and touch without sex necessarily being part of it, with me that is a full form of meeting, not half of one. What such a meeting looks like, you can read at cuddle therapy. Talking can always come first, and that commits you to nothing.

Sources

• Discriminative and Affective Touch: Sensing and Feeling. Francis McGlone, Johan Wessberg & Håkan Olausson, Neuron, 82(4), 737-755, 2014. Gives that alongside the nerves for texture and pressure the skin has a separate class of C-tactile fibers that respond to soft, slow touch and are experienced as pleasant and social.
• Affectionate Touch to Promote Relational, Psychological, and Physical Well-Being in Adulthood. Brett K. Jakubiak & Brooke C. Feeney, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 21(3), 228-252, 2017. Gives that affectionate touch promotes well-being on the relational, psychological and physical fronts, partly because it dampens stress.

Related terms

Platonic touch belongs to the need for skin contact. The terms below place it in that frame.

• Skin hunger. The strong need for touch that platonic touch satisfies.
• Oxytocin. The hormone released during warm, close touch and linked to bonding.
• Consent. Platonic touch too only counts when it is welcome; consent is the precondition.
• Aftercare. The care and closeness after intensity, where non-sexual touch plays a large part.
• Grounding. Coming back into your body through contact, something warm touch helps with.