In the last few weeks, speaking at an event and co-leading a retreat, four women came up to me with almost the same sentence. They had tried a touch exercise on the inside of the wrist and felt nothing. Each one had decided there was something wrong with her.
I told each of them to take a breath. What they described is absolutely normal.
Why does touch start to feel like a chore?
Touch starts to feel like a chore when it becomes a job to get right, because a body that is being audited stops answering.
A chore has an outcome. It is done for someone else, it has a standard, and it ends when it is finished. Touch that arrives with "am I doing this right?" and "should I be feeling more?" has the same shape. You end up looking at the ceiling, running the clock in your head and checking a face.
What does the research say about enjoying touch?
A study from a team in Essex, which I cover in episode 47 of The Scrumptious Woman, found that body awareness is three separate skills doing three different jobs.
| Skill | What it is | What it predicted |
|---|---|---|
| Noticing | Registering that something is happening in your skin | How often orgasm happened, alone and with a partner |
| Body trusting | Believing what your body reports, without overriding or auditing it | How satisfying it was, alone and with a partner |
| Attention regulation | Steering your attention back to your own body | Frequency and satisfaction in solo sex only |
Noticing gets you there, and trusting makes it worth arriving. Both are about listening, and a chore leaves no room for that. Attention regulation is the one that gets trained most, and it stayed with solo sex. It did not travel into the room with a partner.
That is why so many women practise alone for years, get good at it, and then conclude the fault is theirs. They were handed half an instruction.
How do you enjoy touch again when it has started to feel like a chore?
Take the wrist. It takes about three minutes, and the whole job is to ask one question: is that a yes?
- Turn one hand palm up and find the soft patch on the inside of the wrist.
- Stroke it with two fingers of the other hand and ask: is that a yes?
- Change direction and ask again.
- Go lighter, almost grazing, as if the hairs on the wrist might lift. Ask again.
- Add your nails, down and then up. Ask again.
- Watch your own hand, then close your eyes. Notice whether either one changes the sensation.
Whether it is nice and whether you ought to feel it are two other questions, and you can leave both at the door. You will probably have no idea in the first minute, and saying so is the honest answer. What you are building is capacity and curiosity, and the difficulty is the sign the exercise is working.
How do we bring a partner into it without it becoming another task?
Use offers and requests, where nothing gets done. It runs in three rounds of about two minutes, and nobody follows through on any of it.
- Every answer is no. One of you offers ("Would you like a cup of tea?"), and the other says no to everything. Notice where in your body the no settles. No is a full sentence.
- Every answer is yes. The offers are easy ones, like playing with your hair. The other person receives the yes, and nothing happens next.
- Say whichever is true. The offers come, and you answer yes or no exactly as you feel it.
Afterwards, notice whether it was easier to ask or to say yes. I run this in my couples work, and I teach it so that touch stays a question. A yes you can feel is information, and information is what a chore never gives you.
If you want somewhere gentle to start on your own, One Touch is seven days of guided self-touch for learning to feel your own body again. I am an intimacy and touch coach in the UK, and why you may not feel anything when your partner touches you goes further into the same pattern.
Touch stops being a chore the moment your body gets to answer.