We come into the world already knowing what we need.
Inside the womb, we are held… constantly, completely, without interruption. Warmth. Pressure. The steady rhythm of a heartbeat at 72 beats per minute… the exact tempo, as anthropologist Desmond Morris discovered, that soothes a human being at any age. We have never been more held than in those months before we arrived.
Then birth happens.
And the world is big and cold.
We spend the rest of our lives trying to get back there… or pretending we don’t need to. We seek touch in relationships and casual encounters. We expect it from family. And sometimes we pay for it if we cannot get it any other way. Even our language is soaked in it: we reach out, we get in touch, we feel touched. The hunger is so basic it has colonized the words we use for everything else.
Photo credit Vitaly Gariev
The Cycle Begins
In Intimate Behaviour, his landmark study of human contact, Morris traced the way touch moves through an entire life. What he found was clarifying. The need for intimacy doesn’t diminish as we grow. It transforms, goes underground, finds other outlets. But it never leaves.
In the first weeks of life, a baby’s entire world is tactile. She doesn’t yet distinguish between herself and her mother. The unspoken message is simple: don’t ever leave me. Held is safe. Everything else is noise. What a mother provides through skin contact in those early months lays the neurological foundation for everything that follows: the ability to trust, to attach, to feel secure enough to eventually let go.
The toddler begins to let go. She ventures away, but only as far as her eye can reach. The embrace is replaced by the glance. Morris observed that the shared smile becomes, at this stage, a symbolic embrace… one that can operate at a distance. The message shifts: leave me alone, I need to explore. She is learning to hold herself, just enough.
The teenager needs space. The message shifts again: don’t come close. Rough play… the punch on the arm, the wrestling match… takes over where the cuddle left off. It’s the same need, wearing a different disguise.
And then adulthood arrives.
The Return
When we pair-bond as adults, we go back to the beginning.
The early stages of a romantic relationship… the constant contact, the inability to be apart, the skin hunger… mirror what we once experienced as infants. We seek, in a partner, what we first found in a parent: the feeling of being held, known, safe. Not because we haven’t grown up. Because this is what we are.
Morris put it plainly: “A mother and her baby are not partners. The baby does not trust the mother because she feeds and protects him; he loves her because she is who she is.” A true bond of attachment is not a transaction. It is a state of being.
And yet.
As relationships mature, that state of being comes under pressure. Life crowds in. Identity blurs. The closeness that once felt like oxygen can start to feel like suffocation. Space is needed again. The cycle that began in the womb… merge, separate, merge, separate… reasserts itself.
And later still, identity can blur into the relationship entirely. Intimacy fades. The message, sometimes unspoken, becomes: don’t touch me, I’m leaving.
The cycle can repeat, or it can end. It is about finding what meets the need.
What changes in the best of relationships is the language, not the need. Couples who stay connected over time learn to speak touch in multiple dialects: the quick hand on the shoulder, the eye contact across a room, the unhurried embrace that actually shifts the nervous system. They have found ways to stay in contact without the loss of self that early intensity demands.
When that language breaks down, the distance that follows isn’t just physical.
When Touch Goes Missing
Morris documented what humans do when the need for genuine intimacy goes unmet. We don’t stop needing it. We find substitutes.
We seek out professional touchers… doctors, hairdressers, massage therapists… people whose job gives us permission to be touched without the vulnerability of asking. We pour our need for contact into our pets. We reach for food, cigarettes, the weighted comfort of heavy blankets. We self-soothe in ways we rarely name as such.
None of this is pathology. It’s just what a nervous system does when the real thing isn’t available.
But substitutes, as Morris observed, are always second-best. “If only we can become more intimate with our intimates,” he wrote, “then we should need less and less in the way of substitutes for intimacy.”
What This Has to Do with You
You are probably very good at not needing things.
You have learned to manage the distance, to keep the peace, to not make it a big deal. You have told yourself that needing to be held is babyish, or clingy, or beneath you. That you have outgrown it. That you are past all that.
You haven’t. Nobody does.
What happens, instead, is that the need goes underground. It shows up as irritability when your partner doesn’t reach for you. As a vague hollowness after sex. As the disproportionate comfort you take in your cat settling on your lap, or the glass of wine at the end of the day, or the massage you book not because of muscle tension but because you need someone’s hands on your body and that is the only way you know how to ask.
Morris called these substitutes. They work, up to a point.
The women I work with are often astonished to discover how much of their relational pain traces back to this one thing: closeness. Not love… which is often still there… but the physical fact of being near someone. A relationship can be loyal, stable, and entirely empty of the kind of contact that actually reaches you. And you can be in that relationship for years, telling yourself you are fine, without ever naming what is missing.
What shifts in the work we do together is something more basic than communication skills or conflict resolution: the willingness to be reached. To let someone in close enough that it matters. Which means tolerating the risk that it might hurt.
That is the cycle Morris described. It does not end at adulthood.
What all of this asks for, underneath the theory, is a particular kind of courage. Not the dramatic kind.
The small, daily kind: I miss you. I feel distant. I need more than this. Most of us were never taught to say those things.
We were taught to manage, to accommodate, to not make it a thing. And so the need goes unnamed, and the distance becomes the default.
One day we wake up and realize how distant we have become… how isolated… how disconnected. And we wonder why we are so lonely.
We are not alone in that wondering. In 2023, the US Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic. Researcher Julianne Holt-Lunstad found that chronic loneliness carries the same health risk as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.
We treat it like a mood, something to push through. The body registers it like an injury.
The more truthful we can be… with ourselves first, then with each other… the less the cycle has to play out in silence.
If something in this piece named something you have been carrying, in your relationship, or in the absence of one, I work with women who are ready to stop pretending the distance is fine. You can book a conversation here.
Source: Desmond Morris, Intimate Behaviour (1971)
