Touch Starvation After 60: Why It Happens And What Helps

Touch is not the same thing as company, and after sixty it quietly disappears

Two women, both sixty-eight.

One lost her husband two years ago. For the first two weeks she was held constantly — at the door, in the kitchen, at the graveside. People walked in and put their arms around her without asking first. Then the two weeks ended, the casseroles stopped, and so did that. She has not been held since.

The other has been married forty-five years. Her husband is in the next room right now. She sleeps beside him every night, and she cannot remember the last time either of them touched the other on purpose.

The same shortage, arrived at from opposite directions.

One of them at least has a story that explains it. The other doesn’t, because nothing in her life looks like a loss. Her marriage is fine. Her friends call. Her calendar has things on it. And still, some part of her is running on empty in a way she cannot name, which makes it very hard to fix.

It is not loneliness, and calling it that sends you the wrong way

Loneliness is about people. Touch is about skin. They overlap often enough that they get treated as one problem, and then the advice that follows is all about company: join a group, call a friend, sign up for the Tuesday lunch.

That advice works on loneliness. It does very little for this.

You can have a full week — three phone calls, a bridge game, a coffee with your daughter — and still go a month without another person’s hand on you. The calendar is full. The skin is not.

This is worth separating carefully, because the two shortages hide each other. A woman who is genuinely well-connected will look at the loneliness advice, correctly decide it doesn’t apply to her, and conclude that whatever she is feeling must be something else. Boredom, maybe. Or age. Or nothing she would raise with anybody.

Monthly, then yearly

Researchers at Purdue and Texas State followed 1,124 Americans over sixty for about five years, using a nationally representative study that asks, among many other things, how often people are touched.

At the start, the average was roughly once a month. Five years later, it was roughly once a year.

Not less than before. A different order of magnitude altogether.

Over the same period, the share of people with elevated chronic inflammation went from twenty percent to twenty-eight. And when the researchers looked at who had held steady on touch, they found those people were about fourteen percent less likely to end up in the elevated group — after accounting for age, health, marital status and the rest of it.

One study is one study, and inflammation is a blunt instrument. But that first pair of numbers does not need any statistics to be alarming. Monthly to yearly, in five years, in a normal population of people going about normal lives.

Nobody decided any of this. It happened while everyone involved was busy with other things.

Why it disappears without anyone withdrawing

Think about where touch actually came from, across a life.

Small children, who climb on you whether you want it or not. A commute where strangers press against you on a bus. A workplace with handshakes and shoulder-clasps and someone squeezing past you at the copier. A partner who reached for you in passing because you were both moving through the same kitchen at the same time of day.

Almost none of that was arranged. It was a by-product of a life with other bodies moving through it.

Retirement removes the workplace. Distance removes the grandchildren, or reduces them to twice a year. Widowhood removes the person who was simply there. And a long marriage, quietly, removes the reaching-for, because the two of you stopped moving through the same kitchen at the same time — one of you is up at six, the other at nine, and you meet at lunch already dressed.

Nobody stopped loving anybody. The choreography changed, and the touch was inside the choreography.

This is not about sex

It needs saying plainly, because the moment the subject comes up, most people assume that is what is meant, and then the whole thing becomes embarrassing and gets dropped.

The shortage is not sexual. Plenty of people who are perfectly content with that part of their lives, or finished with it, or never especially attached to it, have the same deficit and feel it just as strongly.

What the body wants is much simpler and much stranger than that. Your skin has nerve fibers that exist for one purpose: to register slow, warm, unhurried contact. Not pressure, not temperature, not pain — those have their own channels. These fibers respond best to something moving across the skin at about the speed of a hand stroking an arm, and what they report to the brain is not information. It is pleasantness.

You have a dedicated biological system for being touched kindly. It does not care whether you are married. It does not care how old you are. It does not switch off at seventy because the census says you are past all that.

For a lot of people it simply goes unused for years at a time.

Three places to get some back that ask nothing of anybody

The obvious answer — ask the people who love you — is the hardest one, so it comes last. These three ask nothing of anyone.

One. Pay for hands. A proper wash at the salon, where somebody stands behind you for ten minutes with their fingers on your scalp. A manicure. A barber with hot towels. A massage, if the money is there, but the hair wash is the underrated one: it is inexpensive, it is unremarkable, nobody has to be told why you booked it, and it is fifteen minutes of exactly the kind of contact those nerve fibers are built for. Some women go every week and describe it as being about their hair.

Two. Choose movement that has contact built into it. Partner dancing. Tai chi classes with partner work. Any class where the teacher corrects your posture with their hands, which a lot of yoga and Pilates teachers do — worth asking beforehand whether yours is one of them. The contact comes as part of the activity, so nobody has to discuss it.

Three. Volunteer somewhere physical. Many hospitals run programs where volunteers hold newborns whose parents cannot be at the bedside around the clock. Hospices need people who will sit with someone and hold a hand. These are real jobs with waiting lists and background checks, and they are also hours of skin contact that leave you feeling substantially better.

A word about the answer people will suggest first: get a dog. Dogs are wonderful and there are good reasons to have one. But when researchers looked at physical contact with pets and physical contact with people, and asked which one predicted less loneliness five years on, contact with people did and contact with pets didn’t. Have the dog. Don’t let the dog be the whole plan.

And if you do want to ask someone

Here is why it feels impossible. Asking for company is socially normal — you can say “come for lunch” and nobody thinks twice. Asking to be touched has no polite form. Say it wrong and it sounds like a crisis, and the person you asked will start worrying about you instead of hugging you.

The way around it is to make it a standing arrangement rather than a request, and to strip the emergency out of it. Something like:

“I’d like it if you hugged me when you arrive and when you leave. Nothing’s wrong. I’ve just noticed I can go weeks without anybody touching me, and I don’t much like it.”

That does three things at once. It is specific, so the other person knows exactly what to do. It rules out the crisis reading, so nobody panics. And because it sets up an arrangement instead of a single occasion, you never have to ask again — which is the part that would have stopped you.

Adult children, in my experience of watching this, are usually relieved. They have often been aware that something is thin between you, and have had no idea what it was.

For a husband or wife of forty years, the same sentence works with one change: “Not going anywhere with it. I just want more of it.” The reassurance matters, because a long marriage has developed its own grammar around that subject, and the request can be misread as a complaint about something else entirely.

What to do this week

Book the hair wash.

That’s it, honestly. It is the smallest of the three, it needs no conversation with anyone, and it will tell you within a quarter of an hour whether this shortage is one you actually have. Some people book it, enjoy it mildly, and conclude the whole business doesn’t apply to them. Others find themselves close to tears in the chair and understand something about the past three years.

Either answer is useful, though the second one is more common than most people expect.

If sex is part of your question

Everything above is about the kind of touch that has nothing to do with sex, because that is the shortage most people are carrying and the one almost nobody has a word for. But for some readers sex is part of the question too — desire that changed shape, a body that works differently now, a conversation with a husband or wife that stalled a decade ago and never restarted.

That is a real subject and it deserves somebody who will be direct about it. This publication isn’t that, and pretending otherwise would help nobody.

Suzanne Noble writes Sex Advice for Seniors, which is exactly what the name promises: practical, frank, sometimes blunter than anything you will read here, and written for people over fifty rather than about them. If that is the question you arrived with, start there instead.

You are not being ridiculous

If you recognized yourself in the woman in the next room from her husband, or the woman who was held for two weeks and then not again, the thing to take away is that this is a supply problem and not a character flaw. Nothing about you became needy. Your circumstances stopped delivering something your body has a specific system for receiving, and the system noticed.

You are allowed to want to be touched at sixty-eight, or eighty-one, or any other number. You are allowed to arrange it deliberately, and it counts just as much when it is arranged as when it arrives by accident — a hug you asked for is still a hug.

And if it has been a long time, and reading this made your throat tight: that is information, not weakness. It means the system is intact and waiting.

Related, from the archive:

• Make Peace With the Body You Actually Live In — on living in a body that has changed, without treating it as an opponent.

• When Help Starts Making Life Easier, Not Smaller — on asking for things without losing ground, which is the same muscle the last section asks you to use.

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Sundays are for Plus members, and September runs as one theme: what holds a day together once the things that used to hold it are gone.

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Sources

• Thomas, P. A., & Kim, S. (2021). Lost Touch? Implications of Physical Touch for Physical Health. The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 76(3), e111–e115.

• Brown, T., Giddens, R., & Wilson, S. (2021). Longitudinal Associations of Physical Touch with Loneliness among Older Adults. Innovation in Aging, 5(Suppl 1), 1038 — conference abstract.