“Sometimes we literally crave affection. It’s not about sex, it’s about having someone to cuddle with and to lay their head on your lap. It’s about intimacy and a sense of feeling cared for “
Affection creates the feeling of security. It makes you feel loved, accepted and it enables a more caring relationship. As human beings we crave affection. As a child it is a necessary part of the emotional development. Warm and loving interactions between parent and child helps grow confidence in children. It gives them the ability to communicate better and it builds resilience. These are skills children need in later life to help them manage problems, deal with stress and assist them in forming strong bonds in relationships. When a child does not have affectionate parents they tend to have a lower self esteem, feel more alienated, can act out in a more hostile manner and are quite often anti-social. When parents put too much pressure on children to make them succeed without balancing it out with affection, this has the potential to create stress in children. When physical touch is nurturing, in other words, it is loving and kind, it promotes the development of a young child’s physiological system that is involved in regulating emotions, stress and responses.
When you grow up without affection, or your first attachment experience with the primary caregiver is a sense of feeling unloved, this can create difficulty in closeness and intimacy as well as an inability to sustain deep meaningful relationships as adults. You grow up with continuous feelings of anxiety and avoidance, never fully being able to trust. An insecure child develops fewer social skills and is timid even in the most benign circumstances. This may result in an attachment disorder. This is something that often happens to babies and children who have been neglected or abused. The affect of not having an emotional bond with a primary caregiver brings problems with behaviour and a lack of learning skills when dealing with emotions.
In an intimate relationship, affection helps partners experience an increased sense of harmony, love and mutual understanding . Without affection life is difficult.. You can be faced with intense feelings of loneliness and rejection which can create negative feelings and emotions. Craving and receiving affection and physical touch has huge emotional benefits. It is important to understand that it is normal to need that kind of connection with another person through touch and intimacy.
Feelings have the potential to overwhelm us and those who have lacked affection in their childhood can crave the depth of an emotional connection acutely.
It is important to understand that when dating, if you set the bar too high, or have a level of expectation that is difficult to meet, you can be setting yourself up for failure. Understand that idealisation of romantic relationships does not help. In the modern world of dating today, finding what you are looking for is difficult, there is a perpetual train of thought that with hundreds of profiles to choose from on a dating site, you are always going to find something better.
When you meet someone of substance, take the time to connect. Reach out and make an effort. Relationships, friendships, all need an effort to maintain and regular communication to sustain them. To actually find someone who genuinely loves you for who you are is amazing, but the frivolity of modern dating makes creating something of substance very difficult. Relationships are the essence of life. Our need to connect deeply and be able to offer and receive affection is what gives meaning to our lives. Social media is actually making us less social. One cannot deny that technology and its major advancements has made the world an easier place within which to meet people, but if at the click of a button you can just flick to the next potential relationship or friend, never really taking the time to have deep meaningful discussions, then you are never really going to find someone that you can connect with at an emotional level or have any kind of physical intimacy and therefore manage your craving for affection. If you don’t put any effort into sustaining the friendship or relationship you are not going to get very far.
One of the hardest things to deal with is the long lonely nights. The mind can go to some pretty dark places and in the darkest hours of the night, craving love and affection can be deep. Practicing mindfulness can soothe your soul, but being alone is one of the most difficult things to have to deal with. Meaningless sex does nothing to soothe the craving for affection and intimacy and it can only end up making you feel worse.
Men and women bond differently in relationships. For a woman, a lack of affection makes her feel unloved, disconnected and lonely. She feels unseen, unheard and invalidated. Women naturally have a greater desire for giving and receiving affection than men and when a woman feels unloved her normal response is pull away and she becomes insecure in the relationship. Men bond through physical intimacy. Not just through sex. Hugging, touching, stroking are all signs of affection that men crave. The highest level of intimacy requires the greatest trust in a relationship. It is only when we truly feel emotionally safe with someone can we begin to share the deepest part of who we are. Building an emotional attraction require us to listen attentively and show affection and that creates trust. The higher the trust, the closer the affection, the deeper the intimacy becomes.
“People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realise you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you can open yourself up emotionally in front of them and know that you feel safe… That is intimacy”
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