Love and affectionate touch toward romantic partners all over the world

Abstract

Touch is the primary way people communicate intimacy in romantic relationships and affectionate touch behaviors such as stroking hugging and kissing are universally observed in partnerships all over the world. Here we explored the association of love and affectionate touch behaviors in romantic partnerships in two studies comprising 7880 participants. In the first study we used a cross-cultural survey conducted in 37 countries to test whether love was universally associated with affectionate touch behaviors. In the second study using a more fine-tuned touch behavior scale we tested whether the frequency of affectionate touch behaviors was related to love in romantic partnerships. As hypothesized love was significantly and positively associated with affectionate touch behaviors in both studies and this result was replicated regardless of the inclusion of potentially relevant factors as controls. Altogether our data strongly suggest that affectionate touch is a relatively stable characteristic of human romantic relationships that is robustly and reliably related to the degree of reported love between partners.