The Touch Deficit: Why Nashville Couples Aren't Touching Enough

Somewhere in year seven of our marriage, Brittney and I realized we had stopped touching each other.

Not entirely, and not in any way either of us could have pointed to. We still hugged. We still slept in the same bed. But the casual, unmotivated, no-reason-at-all physical contact that had been constant early on had quietly disappeared, and neither of us had noticed it go.

That discovery was one of the smaller things we addressed in that season, and — looking back — one of the most immediately effective.

Here is an experiment worth running honestly.

Over the next twenty-four hours, count the number of times you and your partner make physical contact that is not functional. Not passing each other in the kitchen. Not handing something over. Not the perfunctory kiss on the way out the door.

Contact that exists for no reason other than contact.

For most long-term couples, that number is startlingly low. And for most, it has been declining gradually for years without either partner making a decision for it to decline or even noticing that it has.

Brittney and I have had to be deliberate about this. With three kids — eleven, seven, and four — a significant portion of our daily physical contact is functional and child-directed. The touch that exists purely between us, for no reason other than connection, does not happen automatically in that environment. It happens because we decided it would.

A couple sharing an intimate moment, nestled closely under soft, rumpled bedsheets.

What the Research Shows About Touch

The research on affectionate touch in intimate relationships is remarkably consistent and, I would argue, underappreciated relative to how actionable it is.

A 2013 study by Debrot, Schoebi, Perrez, and Horn published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin tracked 102 couples using electronic diaries four times daily for a week. The researchers found that everyday affectionate touch — hand-holding, a kiss hello, a spontaneous embrace — was directly associated with enhanced positive affect and relationship satisfaction, with effects that persisted beyond the moment of contact itself.

The mechanism the researchers identified is worth naming: touch functioned as an interpersonal emotion regulation process. It was not merely pleasant. It was doing regulatory work — helping both partners manage their emotional states through physical connection with each other.

The Knot's 2024 Relationship and Intimacy Study found that 82% of couples in serious relationships use physical affection to nurture intimacy — the single most commonly reported intimacy practice, ahead of quality time (81%), thoughtful communication (70%), and expressed appreciation (67%).

Physical affection is, according to couples themselves, the primary vehicle of intimate connection. And it is also, in most long-term relationships, the thing that quietly contracts first.

What Actually Causes the Contraction

Touch does not disappear from long-term relationships through any decision. It contracts through several specific mechanisms.

Functional displacement. In households with children, an enormous proportion of physical contact becomes child-directed. The parent who has been touched continuously all day by small people frequently arrives at the evening with a body that has reached its contact threshold — and the contact that is available is spent before the partner has access to any of it.

Sexual coding. In many long-term relationships, physical touch between partners gradually becomes coded as an initiation of sexual intimacy. Once this coding is established, touch becomes fraught: the partner who does not want sex avoids initiating touch to prevent misunderstanding, and the partner who does want sex experiences any touch refusal as a rejection of more than the touch. The result is a relationship where casual affectionate contact has become impossible because it can no longer be casual.

This is one of the more corrosive patterns I encounter in coaching, and it is remarkably common. Decoupling touch from sexual initiation is frequently one of the highest-leverage interventions available to a couple in this pattern.

Device displacement. Hands occupied by phones are hands not touching a partner. This is not metaphorical. The physical reality of two people on a couch with devices is two people whose bodies are oriented toward screens rather than toward each other, whose hands are unavailable, and whose attention is elsewhere. Lovehoney's 2026 Sex Trends Report found that 54% of people use their phones during dinner — rising to 71% among millennials.

Ambient familiarity. The longer two people share a space, the less remarkable each other's physical presence becomes. The deliberate reaching-for that characterized early relationship — where physical contact was novel and charged — gives way to a comfortable ambient awareness that does not require touch to maintain.

What the Contraction Costs

The cost of touch contraction is not primarily sexual, though it affects that too. It is regulatory and relational.

If affectionate touch functions as an interpersonal emotion regulation process — as the Debrot research suggests — then a couple with a significant touch deficit has lost access to one of the primary mechanisms by which partners help each other manage stress, difficulty, and emotional load. Two people who are not touching are two people regulating alone in the same house.

The second cost is informational. Physical contact communicates something that words do not reliably replicate: I want to be near you. Not for a reason. Just because you are you. In the absence of that consistent nonverbal signal, both partners are left inferring the relationship's health from less reliable data.

And the third cost is that touch, like most capacities, atrophies with disuse. The couple that has not touched non-functionally in months finds that reintroducing it feels awkward — which becomes a further reason not to, which extends the atrophy.

Five Ways to Rebuild

1. Decouple touch from sexual initiation — explicitly.

This may require an actual conversation. "I want to touch you more without it meaning I'm initiating sex, and I want you to be able to touch me the same way." Establishing this explicitly removes the ambiguity that has made casual affection impossible. It is not a romantic conversation. It is a genuinely important one.

2. Extend the duration of existing contact.

You are already hugging occasionally. Make the hugs longer. The research on oxytocin release suggests that meaningful physical contact requires roughly six to ten seconds to trigger the neurochemical bonding response. Most hugs last about two. Extending existing touch costs nothing and requires no new habit.

3. Add contact to transitions.

Arrivals, departures, and the moment of moving from one activity to another are natural insertion points for physical contact. A hand on the back while passing. A brief embrace before leaving the room. These moments already exist in the rhythm of the day and currently contain no contact.

4. Create one device-free physical window.

Ten minutes, phones in another room, sitting or lying in physical contact with no agenda. Not a conversation necessarily. Just contact. This is the single practice I recommend most frequently to couples with a significant touch deficit, because it directly addresses both the device displacement and the atrophy simultaneously.

5. Accept the initial awkwardness.

Reintroducing touch to a relationship where it has atrophied feels strange for a while. Both partners will notice the strangeness. That is not a signal that it is wrong — it is a signal that the capacity has genuinely diminished and is being rebuilt. It passes within a few weeks of consistent practice.

Why This Matters More Than It Sounds

Of everything I write about — the frameworks, the somatic practices, the difficult conversations, the desire work — touch is the intervention with the lowest barrier and among the highest returns.

It requires no scheduling. No vulnerability conversation. No skill development. No time that does not already exist in the day. It is available in the next five minutes.

And for a significant number of the couples I encounter, the touch deficit is doing more quiet damage than any of the more complicated dynamics they came in to discuss.

Start there.

Book a free discovery call and let's talk about what has contracted in your relationship — and what rebuilding it could look like.

And if you'd like to explore guided experiences designed around non-goal-directed physical presence and genuine sensory connection, Coelle was built for exactly this.

Scott Schwertly is a Nashville-based sex and intimacy coach, founder of Coelle, and co-host of Do You Feel That? with his wife Brittney.