Despite being surrounded by people, quarantine has been lonely. Maybe it’s the lack of visiting family or seeing friends. Video calls are nice because you get to hear your friends laugh and tell them about your life, but it’s not the same as getting together.
It also feels like everyone and their mother got out of a relationship around the time quarantine started. It was surely a cultural phenomenon; more people got “zumped”—Zoom dumped —than should be legal at the end of March. Myself included.
I miss casual intimacy. Not in the way that I miss the person I was in a relationship with, but rather the way I miss being able to indulge a random urge to hug my friends while walking down the street, or grab the hand of a person I just met and spin them around on a dance floor. I miss cuddling up next to someone on a couch, resting my head against their shoulder and scrolling through memes on Instagram together.
But why is that something that is so integral to the human experience? Why does touch matter?
A simple Google search will tell you how touching other people by any means—hugging, shaking hands, kissing, high-fiving, or a simple, comforting arm pat —improves your physical health. It increases your daily doses of dopamine and serotonin, lowers your cholesterol, boosts your immune system, and even releases oxytocin into your brain.
No wonder people go “crazy” for one another.
But is that why we all seem to miss casual, physical intimacy?
Many times I have lamented with friends about the loss of emotional closeness that happens when you are not in the physical vicinity of others. Zoom is great to see your friends, but it is not a replacement for piling up on the couch and watching a movie together. There is a degree of separation that acts as a constant elephant in the room.
Google doesn’t answer those questions. Or Bing, I checked that too.
Given my half-fulfilled minor in psychology (meaning I am clearly an expert on the human mind), I think that it comes from the first moments of our life. Before we understand language, or can even see for that matter, all we know is the touch of others. Our first associations are that being touched means love, so of course now without the touching, simple brushing hands as you walk down the road, or that brief moment when hands touch when you pass an item to someone else, it feels like there is less love.
So as not to leave you with dark thoughts, I’ll remind you that that isn’t actually true. Love is a concept. There is no such thing as more or less of it. So yes, we are mourning the loss of casual physical touch, but the love is still there. We just have to find it and express it in a different way now.
Laughing in our weekly Zoom calls, falling for a new book or exercise routine, hugging your roommate every chance you get may seem like different versions of love…but it isn’t bad.