As he surveyed the world from on high, I came to know a level of contentment and calm that had previously been missing in my life. Day after day, he sat in the crook of my arm, his little arm across my shoulder, his hand on the back of my neck. As a stay at home dad, I spent years with my son. I found this kind of physical connection when my son was born. There is only one space in our culture where long-term platonic physical contact is condoned for men, and that is between fathers and their very young children. While women are much freer to engage in physical contact with each other, men remain suspect when they touch others. How quickly does that idea raise the ugly specter of homophobia? And why? And if you are a man, imagine five minutes of contact with another man. Between persons who are not lovers and never will be. How often do men actually get the opportunity to express affection through lasting platonic touch? How often does it happen between men? Or between men and women? Not a handshake or a hug, but lasting physical contact between two people that is comforting and personal, but not sexual. Men need gentle platonic touch in their lives just as much as women do. Instead, we walk in the vast crowds of our cities alone in a desert of disconnection. Cut off from the deeply human physical contact that is proven to reduce stress, encourage self-esteem and create community. We are cut off from it. The result is touch isolation.Īnd where does this leave men? Physically and emotionally isolated. Which, sadly, is pretty much every context we encounter. And so, we prove our trustworthiness by foregoing physical touch completely in any context in which even the slightest doubt about our intentions might arise. In part, because so many men have behaved poorly.

Touch IsolationĪccordingly, it has become every man’s job to prove they can be trusted, in each and every interaction, day by day and case by case. There is no corresponding narrative about women.

That men don’t know how to physically connect otherwise. We collectively suspect that, given the opportunity, men will revert to the sexual at a moment’s notice. In American culture, we believe that men can never be entirely trusted in the realm of the physical. They always do.” Quickly on the heels of that thought, I wondered, “Wait a minute, why do I distrust men in particular?” The little voice in my head didn’t say, “I don’t necessarily trust people to not be creepy”, it said, “ I don’t trust men”.

In preparing to write about the lack of gentle touch in men’s lives, I right away thought, “I feel confident I can do platonic touch, but I don’t necessarily trust other men to do it.

Men dont get touched