TOUCHSENSITIVE

Is the digital world changing the way we feel about human contact? Fiona Golfar discovers the power at our fingertips.

Is the digital world changing the way we feel about human contact?

THERE ARE NOW VESTS YOU CAN BUY THAT ENABLE HUGS TO BE GIVEN REMOTELY

When I was a teenager I lived in Paris, as the paying guest of an impoverished aristocratic woman who made amazing quenelles in the dirtiest kitchen I’ve ever seen. Her technique for teaching her lodgers French was simple: she never spoke English, and eventually – out of hunger or curiosity, or both – we simply picked it up. I remember my father visiting and sitting at lunch with her as they tried to communicate, she with no English and he with the rudiments of French. They got on like a house on fire. The thing that struck me was the way he touched her arm as he stammered out some incomprehensible sentence. I clearly remember her looking down at his hand and then up in delight at his smiling face, and I saw the way he had gained her trust with the lightest touch.

Touch. It’s not for everybody. My daughter Molly, whose nickname in the family is “Do Not Disturb”, has firm views on when it is and isn’t okay to touch her. She rarely likes me to hug and kiss her – I make her feel “smothered”. “It just means too much to you,” she explains. She’s right. I am a tactile person (my son is the same). It’s how I make contact and show affection, but I’ve had to learn that not everyone feels this way, even my own daughter. Molly and I are close, and there is no question of our love for each other, but I have to show her my affection in a different way; with words, say (and sometimes, if she’s feeling expansive, she teases me by saying I can put my hand on her shoulder). But what I do know is that when something happens that matters, something big, she hugs me without hesitation.

I, in turn, didn’t like to touch my own mother. Our relationship was complicated. When she would reach out for me, I too felt smothered. I didn’t like the scent of her, I was choked by it, yet I could lie and cuddle my father forever, as my daughter can my husband. My last memory of my dad was of sitting in a chair by his bed in the moments after he died. Struggling to absorb what was happening, I took his hand and stroked my head with it. It felt primal.

We live in a society that has become obsessed with touch, far from the postwar shake-hands-with-your-father world my parents grew up in. Today, teenagers hug strangers at first meet. And recent research suggests that waiters who use a “light touch” while serving can earn more in tips. One friend admitted she rather liked being frisked by airport security, thinking of it as “like a mini-massage”.

We respond to touch. That shiver of pleasure when slipping into the fluid softness of a silk shirt. The delicious sense of wellbeing that comes from sliding between cool cotton sheets. By the same token, there are those who can’t stand the feel of recent fashion favourites neoprene and Lurex, and God forbid, elastane.

Believing in touch and what it tells you about something, or even someone, is the most basic instinct we have. I only have to shake hands with someone to gain a sense of them. I can be silenced by a wet, weak handshake. Likewise, the day I met the man who became my husband we were at an outdoor concert. We went to cross a busy road and he reached out his hand to walk me over it. The moment I took it I had a sense that I was safe, home. It still feels that way.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that as the world gets crazier, physical interaction feels more important. Touch inspires confidence: a hesitant touch makes us nervous; a firm hand reassures. I like nothing more than a visit to my hairdresser, for example – I like the feel of hands that know what they are doing on my hair. Fashion journalist Sarah Mower agrees: “I want to know that the person whose hands I am entrusting myself to is giving me exactly what I want. I don’t want to pay someone to make me feel anxious.”

A hyper-awareness of touch is hardly surprising. At a time when people are reportedly more isolated than ever, the one thing they can’t get from their computer or smartphone is physical connection. Yet there are now vests you can buy that enable hugs to be given remotely via an app, and there’s even a bodysuit that uses virtual reality to allow the wearer to experience sex. As a result, our feelings towards touch have never been more complicated, or more crucial.

Gill Westland is a body psychotherapist who works in Cambridge. The kind of people she sees often have issues around touch. “Many of my clients are academics who work in IT,” she explains. “It’s not uncommon for people here to be more cerebral and less physically aware, and if you compound that with being hooked into a computer then their experiences of contact are rarer than of those whose work connects them to other people.”

In fact, what many presume is an issue emerging within younger, tech-obsessed generations affects older people, too. “Sometimes, although not always, these are people who had limited physical contact as children,” Westland explains. Perhaps they were touched fairly infrequently by their mothers as babies and toddlers – in the 1940s and 50s it was considered wrong to pick up a baby other than to feed them – or were spanked or beaten by their parents as young children or teenagers. In these cases, says Westland, some children tend to numb themselves to what is happening, and this can lead to them being unable to have loving sexual experiences as adults, as they often subconsciously seek out violent relationships where they can experience that same familiar numbness. The touch Westland uses is considered and restrained. “I might just touch someone on the shoulder if needed or put my hand on their chest if required,” she says. “The chest is where we hold so many feelings. It is where our breath comes from.”

Now, though, the idea of intuitive touch therapy is moving beyond the realms of psychotherapy and into the mainstream, with the healing power of touch creating its own industry. You can book “intuitive touch therapies” at day spas, have massages fully clothed and, at the fringier end of the spectrum, pay people to hug you.

The New York Times recently ran a piece on attractive 30-yearold Brianna Quijada, manager of a vegan restaurant by day and a professional “cuddler” by night. Quijada first got into the idea by visiting websites such as cuddlist.com and thesnugglebuddies. com, which promise to ease loneliness via a roster of “professional cuddlers”. For $110, you can visit Quijada in her rented space and she will give you a feeling of being understood. Her methods range from hand-holding to eye-gazing or people lying with their head in her lap – whatever works. Clients sign an agreement that no sexual activity of any kind will take place with “snugglers”.

Part of the attraction of the new touch therapies is that they seem to go beyond traditional massage-type treatments. A chemical reaction takes place when you experience human touch. A good hug should lower your cortisol levels and release oxytocin – the so-called “cuddle hormone”, and the one released when mothers nurse their babies or when people fall in love. Its effect is to calm you and create a sense of “connection”.

It’s the intuitiveness of these treatments that claims to be able to unlock something deeper, more spiritual, more primal. And unsurprisingly, the telephone numbers of touch therapists are now being passed around with the enthusiasm previously reserved for a good facialist or acupuncturist. Continued on page 170