Her Touch

There is an incomparable purity in the relief I feel from her authentic touch.

I used to think the most relief available to me came from the euphoric feeling delivered by the second IPA. Alcohol provided relief, yes, but the emotional and cognitive sensations delivered by a toxin are anything but pure or authentic.

Her touch, though, carries with it unspoken messages of security, trust, and approval. I study emotional intimacy, physical intimacy, and sexual satisfaction. Intimacy is a misunderstood word often used as an inaccurate substitute for the word, “sex,” when the speaker or writer is too shy to utter or scribe those three taboo letters. Physical intimacy, for example, is most often assumed to mean sex. The touch I am describing is the most intimate physical contact I can imagine, and it does not involve erotic organs or regions. It is the touch of connection as tightly bonded as hydrogen and oxygen in a water molecule. And equally life sustaining.

She most often touches my thigh with her fingertips. It is the outside of my thigh about midway up – not an inner/upper thigh touch meant for arousal. It is meant to convey the message that she is here, sharing this space, and that there is nowhere she’d rather be.

Security, trust, and approval. She approves of how I show up in the world – how I carry my share of the burden, and how I interact with the people about whom she cares.

My parents are aging. They are healthy and vibrant – I just saw pictures from their winter get-away to warm weather, and of the new car they just purchased – but I have little or no influence on the course of the rest of their lives. They are getting older, and maybe a caregiving instinct should have kicked in by now. I feel guilt that it hasn’t. I love them very much, and appreciate them now more than ever before in my life, but I don’t feel responsible for them. Regarding my relationship with my parents, she does not hold me to a standard I do not feel.

I do feel responsible for my four kids – even the three who have crossed the arbitrary threshold into government-assigned adulthood. They can vote, get their own credit cards, and be tried as adults, but I still feel a deeply ingrained onus to influence. Their success is their own, but their failure would be my failure – at least that is how it feels (I hope none of them read this, because it is not meant to add weight to their shoulders). I think that’s the best job I can do to describe my feelings of duty to my children in just one paragraph – intentionally succinct because this piece is not really about them, but my obligation is important to understand in the context of her touch.

She prioritizes our kids over me. It took sobriety for me to understand this family dynamic, although my active alcoholism is when her favoritism was most apparent. I just didn’t have access to relational clarity when I was in an alcoholic haze. Understanding that my top priority prioritizes our offspring over me was a jarring realization. It was quite disappointing until I understood that this is the family dynamic that keeps our species thriving. I prioritize her while she prioritizes our children, and we all survive as a result.

And now I recognize the family dynamic for the incredible blessing it is in my life. She couldn’t touch me the way she does if she didn’t approve of my interaction with, and protection of, our children. If I was mean or absent or harsh or oblivious, approval would be missing from her touch because there is nothing more important to her than her kids. The touch of security, trust, and approval cannot be conveyed to someone who doesn’t give her babies room in his heart.

I don’t remember if I ever felt this touch when we were in our 20s – the last time our relationship was this pure. I don’t remember because the touch would not have been received with the same importance then as it is now in midlife. I felt resilient, defiant, and invincible back then. That’s what innocence and naivety feels like. If her authentic touch was offered at all at the start of our relationship, it was offered fleetingly as our alcohol-induced arguments started long before our lives were intertwined. Before I crossed the invisible line into addiction, the security, trust, and approval represented by that touch was destroyed. She no longer had it in her, so before I learned to appreciate it, that touch was gone. It stayed gone for decades.

The security required for her intimate touch comes from emotional safety – consistency in communication and actions. The trust required comes from replacing bad memories with good ones, and from processing resentments with empathy, because trauma doesn’t just go away no matter how patient we are. And the approval in her intimate touch comes from how I treat her, our kids, and, if I’m being honest, her cats who also hold a high priority in her life.

I can’t guess how many times we’ve had sex. We’ve had lusty, hungry, young-adult sex. We’ve had naive and clumsy sex. We’ve had sloppy, selfish, drunken sex. We’ve had quickies, and we’ve had obligatory, pleasureless, neverending sex. We’ve had sex because we both wanted to, and sex coerced in despicable ways for which I will never forgive myself. We’ve had one-sided sex and mutually orgasmic sex. We’ve had carefree vacation sex and quiet sex within earshot of the innocent. We’ve had exotic sex in contorted positions and mundane convenient sex barely requiring conscious awareness.

We’ve had sex that I considered intimate. I thought it was a form of intimacy, that is, until I felt the incomparable purity in her authentic touch of security, trust, and approval.

I don’t remember precisely when, in the past few years, I first felt her touch on my thigh while we were having sex. It was probably subtle at first – not the touch of a confident woman, but a toe being dipped into cold water. And maybe I mistook it as a physical adjustment, or a resting place for an otherwise unoccupied hand. But now, there is no mistaking the intentionality, or the impact, of her touch.

I once backed into an electric fence while holding the bridle of a horse. The charge didn’t hurt me as I was not its terminal destination (it sure startled and confused the horse, though). To me, it felt like a nerve-tingling surge that made all my hairs stand on end and my heart quiver slightly. And that’s what her intimate touch – tips of fingers on the middle of the outside of my thigh – feels like during any kids of sexual encounter,

Her touch supersedes desire, arousal, and even orgasm as the most intimate aspect of our physical connection. Her touch connects our souls with a purity that cleanses our history and blazes a clear path for the future. Her touch makes the IPA-induced euphoria of the past feel like time-wasting distraction. Imagine that…I now recognize the thing I was most terrified to leave behind in sobriety as a regret.

I’ve never been as attracted as I am to her now. It is not her beautiful smile or her sense of humor or her nurturing instincts or her fiery protection of her family or her loyalty or consistency or morality. I am attracted – even addicted – to her pure and authentic, non-sexual, intimate touch.

The thing that brings me the greatest feeling of safety is a connection I did not previously imagine to be possible.

Pure relief from her authentic touch.

If you are sober and ready to do the work to earn back authentic, pure touch, please consider joining us in SHOUT Sobriety.

SHOUT Sobriety