The gradual decline of touch in relationships
Most relationships don’t lose touch because something dramatic happens. There’s no big betrayal, no sudden collapse of intimacy. Instead, touch quietly and gradually slips out of daily life. In my line of work I hear this story a lot: ‘my partner and I just don’t touch anymore…and I miss it’. There are so many possible reasons that your relationship has lost the physical spark. Life gets busy, bodies get tired, children, work, stress, health issues, resentment, mismatched desire, or years of routine slowly nudge physical contact down the priority list. What once felt spontaneous and easy begins to feel awkward, loaded, or risky. So it happens less, and before long you can be deeply committed to someone you barely touch.
How a lack of touch affects your relationship
This isn’t trivial. Touch is not just a ‘nice extra’ to have in life – it’s a primary way humans regulate their nervous systems, communicate safety, and feel bonded. It’s a huge benefit of being in a relationship. When touch disappears, both partners feel it, often in different ways. One partner may feel unwanted, undesirable, or emotionally abandoned. The other may feel pressured, tense, or afraid that any touch will lead to expectations they can’t meet. Over time, both may start protecting themselves by avoiding contact altogether.
This is what a touch-starved relationship looks like: not dramatic, not necessarily unhappy on the surface – but subtly lonely. The good news is that rebuilding touch doesn’t require fixing everything at once. It doesn’t require forcing desire or ‘trying harder’ sexually. It requires re-introducing touch in ways that feel safe, intentional, and honest for both people. Here are three ways to begin that I’ve seen work through the course of my career as a Bodyworker and Intimacy Coach.
1. Build small moments of non goal-oriented touch
Think of touch in your relationship like a muscle that has weakened through disuse. You don’t rebuild it by intermittently trying to lift something heavy. You rebuild it with small, regular, low-pressure movements. In long-term relationships, touch often disappears because it becomes overly weighted on the sexual and goal-oriented. A hand on the body starts to mean ‘I want this to go somewhere.’ A kiss carries an unspoken question. A cuddle feels like a prelude rather than a complete experience in itself. When touch always points towards sex, it stops being safe and connecting – especially for the partner who feels less desire or more pressure. This often leads to the trap of one feeling rejected and ceasing to make the effort, and the other feeling overwhelmed and avoidant. So start smaller. Much smaller.
When you pass your partner in the kitchen, you have a choice. You can rush past with no contact at all. Or you can take one to three seconds to squeeze their hand, kiss the top of their head, brush their arm, pat their bum, or lean in briefly.
These micro-moments matter because they:
- restore touch as something ordinary, not charged
- signal affection without expectation
- rebuild bodily familiarity
- create warmth without pressure
The key here is consistency, not intensity. A few seconds, many times a day, is far more powerful than a rare, high-stakes attempt at intimacy. Crucially, this kind of touch must truly be non-goal-oriented. If every small touch secretly carries hope or resentment, your partner will feel it. This is about rebuilding safety first.
2. Create a monthly receiving appointment
One of the most effective ways to repair a touch-starved dynamic is to separate touching from reciprocity. In many relationships, touch becomes transactional: I’ll touch you if you touch me. This can sound fair, but it often creates subtle tension. Both partners stay half-present, waiting their turn, monitoring fairness, or holding back. Instead, build in one clear appointment per month where only one person receives:
- No mutual touching.
- No swapping halfway through.
- No giving back afterwards.
One person simply receives – being massaged, stroked, held, or caressed – while the other focuses entirely on touching. On a different date, you switch roles.
This does several important things:
- it removes performance pressure
- it allows the receiver to fully relax
- it allows the giver to be fully present
- it creates clarity and safety around expectations
For the receiving partner, this can be profoundly nourishing – especially if they’re used to staying alert or emotionally responsible during intimacy. For the touching partner, it can be unexpectedly relieving to know they don’t have to ‘make it mutual’ or read between the lines. They can simply touch. Keep these sessions simple. They don’t need to be long, elaborate, or sexual. What matters is the clarity of roles and the permission to fully inhabit them.
3. Explore the possibility of consensually taking pleasure from touching
When I introduce this concept in my couples coaching sessions it often creates a radical and transformative shift. Most couples operate with an unspoken rule: touching should entirely be for the benefit of the person being touched. The giver is meant to be generous, attuned, and selfless.
While this sounds loving, it can easily slip over into martyr-like ‘pleasing’ and performance anxiety which quietly drains desire. Over time, touching becomes work rather than pleasure. For the person being touched within this dynamic there can be a huge amount of pressure to ‘enjoy it’, reach climax or accept what is given.
There is another option. You can explore touch where the focus is on what feels pleasurable, satisfying, or interesting for the person doing the touching – with the full consent of the partner being touched. This doesn’t mean ignoring your partner’s boundaries or comfort. It means acknowledging that the act of touching itself, letting your hands explore and ‘feel’ – rather than ‘do’ – can be pleasurable, enlivening, and erotic for the toucher. When couples open up this possibility, something often shifts:
- the toucher becomes more engaged and curious
- touch feels less dutiful and more alive
- desire can re-emerge without being forced
- both partners experience a re-balancing and a relief from ingrained routines
This practice can be deeply healing in relationships where one partner has felt responsible for the other’s experience, or where touch has become overly careful and cautious. Clarity and consent are essential in this exercise, here’s how to set it up:
The partner touching states where and how they want to touch – e.g. ‘I want to gently squeeze and roll your earlobes between my fingers, and stroke and explore the ridges and skin of your ears’; ‘I want to let my hands wander over your thighs, pressing into the muscles and enjoying the texture of your hair and skin’ etc. You are not touching to do something nice for them, you are touching because their body feels nice to touch.
The partner being touched listens then states any boundaries – e.g. can you happily give your body as a gift to be explored in this way; ‘Yes my ears are yours to play with but I don’t want anything actually inside my earhole’; ‘If the pressure is too much on my thighs I’ll say so’ etc. You don’t have to go into ‘enduring’ mode, you have agency over how your body is explored.
Set a timer (3-5 minutes is nice to start with) then explore that touch. Let your body be relaxed and really tune into the pleasure in your hands.
As the person being touched, it might not be what you would have chosen – it might not be your preference – but let yourself enjoy the experience of being consensually used for pleasure!
When the timer goes off you can either switch roles, or stay as you are and explore a new area of the body/type of touch.
Having a framework like this to explore, where no-one is under pressure to perform or achieve, can be hugely refreshing. You will probably learn something new about the way your partner likes to touch – and often this is an indicator of how they like being touched. Where touch and physical connection may have grown stale over time, reversing the polarity in this way affords both partners a new perspective and means you can reconnect without the old baggage, pressures and expectations.
Reconnection happens in the body, not the head
A touch-starved relationship doesn’t heal through discussion alone or simply continuing in the same routines. Reconnection happens through repeated, embodied experiences of safety, pleasure, and presence. You don’t need to ‘fix’ your relationship to begin touching again, and you don’t need to wait for desire to magically return before you start. Small consistent choices, clear agreements and honest exploration will – over time – create a new relational memory where touch is no longer risky, pressured, or absent, but woven back into daily life.
If you feel inspired by this blog, if you’re struggling with touch in your relationship, and if you want more guidance on how to reconnect then I recommend either:
- My online courses in basic massage, or intimate massage.
- My private couples coaching sessions in Brighton, London or Stockholm.
- My couples massage workshop in London.
With Love,
Libby
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