You love him. You've told your friends that a dozen times this month, and meant it every time. You've also caught yourself lingering a beat too long on a hug from someone else, noticing a hand on your back at a party, feeling something you didn't expect to feel, and then spending the drive home wondering what that means about you.
It means your skin has a need a video call cannot meet. Touch is not a bonus feature of a relationship. It sits on the same shelf as sleep and food, and a body that goes weeks or months without it will register the deficit whether or not you gave it permission to. Feeling something when a stranger's hand lands on your shoulder is not your body choosing someone else. It's your body registering contact, because contact is what it has been missing.
Why this isn't a loyalty pattern
A craving is not a decision, and it is not the same thing as wanting to act on it. The two get confused constantly, mostly because we've been taught that any physical response to someone who isn't our partner must mean the relationship is failing. It usually means something simpler: distance has a cost, and the body pays it first.
What to actually do with it
Naming it honestly is the first move, to yourself and, when you're ready, to him. The second is building deliberate touch back into the contact you do have: the video call where you're both doing the same physical gesture at the same time, the letter that arrives with something to hold, the visit planned with actual touch time built into it rather than left to chance. And your own body still needs tending in the meantime. Two minutes of your own hand, thumb to forefinger, slow, saying I am safe right now, is not a replacement for him. It is maintenance on a system that still needs some contact to run.
The need is real. Meeting it honestly, in the relationship you're actually in, is different work from pretending it isn't there.