Touch

A customer walked up to my cash register, and all of a sudden I had time traveled back to when I was sixteen. This man smelled just like my first love; apparently he was wearing the same scent that young man used to wear. It was interesting that I immediately recognized that smell. The olfactory bulb that gives us our sense of smell is part of the limbic system of the brain, associated with memory and emotion. That's the scientific reason why smells evoke such strong emotions. My boyfriend and I really didn't have what it took for a long term relationship, and I broke up with him and it didn't end well. But more than thirty years later, I smell his cologne and it brings back a flood of everything good about who we were back then.

There is nothing like a first love. Do you remember yours? That very first time when we fall madly, passionately, head-over-heels in love and we are absolutely sure no one has ever felt this way before. I can close my eyes and remember what it felt like to rest my head on his shoulder. The way the lightly starched shirts he wore to work felt on my cheek. The way he smelled.

I recently took another online quiz here that told me my love language is physical touch. Twenty years ago Gary Chapman wrote a book, "The Five Love Languages." I've never read it, but Chapman says that there is a primary way we both feel and express love:

words of affirmation
receiving gifts
acts of service
quality time
physical touch

The problems arise when, say, a woman whose love language is acts of service is with a man whose language is words of affirmation. She runs around picking up his prescription at the pharmacy, making him delicious meals and taking his car in for servicing, but while he may appreciate it, he doesn't feel all that loved because he needs to hear the words. And while he tells her he loves her often and praises her verbally, what would really make her feel loved would be if he would get out the vacuum cleaner or help her do her taxes.

For all that we lacked otherwise, this first love and I spoke the same language. I love to touch and be touched, in what might appear to some, to be needy. He never made me feel that way, and only occasionally would shift me around when I sat on his lap. I suppose after a while his one leg would get numb and he'd just need me to move. He was only human, after all.

Physical touch is something that is missing more and more in American life. We are not a hugging kind of culture to begin with, and then there's the fear of touch being thought of as inappropriate or even as sexual harassment. Maybe that's why we are so wild about our pets, furry cats and dogs we can lavish affection on without feeling self-conscious.

I don't know about you, but sometimes my inner two-year-old just wants to run up to all the people she feels affectionate toward, and hug them really, really hard around their legs.

Susan