We live in an age increasingly prepared to
see hurtful aspects lurking within many apparently
so-called minor situations, and ready to lend
greater public acknowledgement to what had
previously been merely private pains. It is
in this context that we should give due recognition
to a truly grave hurt that can unfold, within
established relationships, when there is almost
no touch left between the parties, when one
partner repeatedly moves to hold the other’s
hand, or perhaps caress their shoulder or
waist – and receives no response at all,
or a subtle turn away and withdrawal.
We’re not talking here of the more obvious
and well-known problem of a lack of sex (though
this may be present too), but of the long-term
and arguably equally serious or even greater
hurt that can ensue when one partner’s body
as a whole becomes somehow unreceptive to,
or uninterested in, the other’s touch. We
know, of course, how much this is awkward
on an early date. We’re ready, at a cultural
level, to give due weight to a minor physical
rejection when it happens around a potential
new partner. But there is as much loneliness
and agony within settled couples around unheld
hands, except that here it feels a great deal
more embarrassing and more humiliating even
to raise the issue. Perplexingly, the very
person who quietly withdraws their hand or
leaves it agonisingly limp in our own, can
also be the one who is named in our will,
with whom we share a mortgage and to whom
we have given over our emotional lives. How
devastating to self-confidence an inert hand
can be in this situation. Lifeless in ours,
it plays into every anxiety about unacceptability,
exploitation and rejection. But precisely
because it is so devastating, it becomes impossibly
hard to discuss in any fruitful way. We are
liable either to say nothing at all, or else
to express our hurt through bitterness and
sarcasm. We cannot stay long enough with the
pain we feel to share it – and try to correct
it – with the partner themselves. We may
find it wholly beyond us to develop the authority,
self-belief and legitimacy to say: you didn’t
take my hand after dinner, you never touch
me of your own accord – and it is driving
me slowly but definitively insane. We don’t
have this kind of offence mapped on our chart
of acceptable verbalisable unhappiness, it
doesn’t feel like a toll we have a language
for or the right to.
And yet, we should, despite our anxieties,
retain the courage and conviction of our feelings.
An inert hand or a lack of touch, is truly
as serious a problem as we feel it is. The
request to be held and physically acknowledged
is a subject of deep gravity, rooted in our
capacity to tolerate and like ourselves. We
should not compound our misery by a sense
that we are not allowed to feel or share it.
Then, when we can manage it, we should learn
to pick up the partner’s hand with a newfound
confidence and say that the little flinch
or inertness we feel when we do so is a huge
problem for us, that what they may blithely
dismiss as ‘this touching business’ is
part of why we’re in a relationship in the
first place, that it matters as much as anything
else does to us and that if they care at all
for us or the continuance of the union, then
they will have to take the pain on board at
last. We should have the bravery finally to
know in our hearts that this ‘small’ thing
is not small at all: it may be quite simply
integral to how we know we’re loved – and
how and when we feel we’re not.
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