Men who are anxiously attached are less satisfied with the intimate touch received from their partners, regardless of the type of touch they receive. This finding comes from a new study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.
Routine intimate behaviors, such as cuddling after sex and kissing, have been linked to greater relationship satisfaction. Interestingly, while the frequency of these touch behaviors is important to relationship quality, it appears that the way individuals evaluate these behaviors may be even more crucial.
Researcher Samantha A. Wagner and her team aimed to explore the link between touch satisfaction and marital satisfaction, through the lens of attachment theory.
“Evaluating touch within a romantic adult attachment framework in marriage may contribute to our understanding of why certain individuals seek more intimate touch than others and may require different levels of it in order to feel satisfied,” Wagner and colleagues say.
A study was conducted among 184 different-sex married couples who had been married for an average of 6 years. Questionnaires asked subjects to rate their satisfaction with physical affection in their relationship (touch satisfaction) and report the types of physical affection received from their partner (routine affection). Participants were also scored along the attachment dimensions of anxious/nonanxious depending on their worry about being rejected, and avoidant/secure depending on their avoidance of intimacy. They additionally completed a relationship satisfaction scale.
First, results showed that women were more satisfied with touch in their relationships and reported more physical affection from their partners, compared to men. In line with previous research, routine affection and touch satisfaction were positively related to marital satisfaction.
When it came to attachment tendencies, men whose wives scored higher in avoidance reported less satisfaction with touch in their relationship. However, once researchers added routine affection into the model, this relationship was no longer significant. This suggests that men with more avoidant wives were less satisfied with the touch they received because they were not receiving it as often.
Next, both husbands’ and wives’ anxiety was linked to lower touch satisfaction. Mediation analysis showed that routine affection explained this effect for women. It did not, however, account for the effect of husbands’ anxiety. This supports the idea that dissatisfaction with a partner’s touch may stem from more than just the types of touch behaviors received. Rather, touch satisfaction likely also has to do with the way intimate touch behaviors are interpreted and evaluated.
Still, the researchers express that “greater engagement in routine affection not only explained the most variance in touch satisfaction but also associated independently with better overall evaluations of the marriage, suggesting that—independent of how it is appraised or attachment orientation—engagement in routine affection appears to matter.”
The authors conclude that future longitudinal studies would allow a deeper exploration of the relationship between adult attachment, intimate touch, and relationship satisfaction.
The study, “Touch me just enough: The intersection of adult attachment, intimate touch, and marital satisfaction”, was authored by Samantha A. Wagner, Richard E. Mattson, Joanne Davila, Matthew D. Johnson, and Nicole M. Cameron.