‘Do not touch’: In Ireland we have conditioned ourselves to stay at arm’s length

Дата публикации: 17-08-2026 04:31:00

The way we touch each other is such a delicate thing, with a fine line between lovingness and lechery

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My formative years were spent in Ethiopia, where platonic touch was on display in a way it is not here. Men held hands as they walked along the street, kissed each other’s cheeks multiple times on greeting, increasing the number of kisses if they had not seen each other in ages. Gursha is a tradition in which people feed each other by hand, showing love and trust.

In Ireland, these are gestures that would be more familiar between a parent and child. Between adults, affection is more understated, grown-ups having conditioned ourselves to stay at arm’s length from each other. I’m fairly sure I’d have the Minstrels slapped out of my hand if I tried to plop one into a mate’s mouth as a sign of our closeness.

It’s children I envy, their uninhibited and overflowing demonstration of love. My seven-year-old daughter sees her friend Felix at 8am in the school lane. They scream each other’s names, run into each other like little sumo wrestlers. They walk with arms around each other’s backs, glued together as they get into line.

When a woman recently took me by the hand at an event to guide me through rooms filled with people I didn’t know, there was something childlike about it. It was a subtly intimate and comforting act.

Greeting someone recently with my arms outstretched, my heavy winter coat gaped open like a cape and his hands slipped inside the layers and on to my waist as we lent in to each other. He touched me no more tenderly than if I had been in a summer dress, but it felt sweetly attentive.

The way we touch each other is such a delicate thing, with a fine line between lovingness and lechery. Years ago, in a busy canteen, a petite, chirpy woman was at the coffee machine. A man stood behind her, a big fellah, put his two hands on her shoulders for a beat too long, and asked how she was doing.

“Please don’t touch me,” she said plainly. The hum of the kitchen and tinkle of teaspoons stopped. He flibber-flabbered and raised his hands in mock surrender, in exaggerated embarrassment. She calmly got her coffee and left.

In a bar, a man asks if I am married. My gross-o-meter is already off the scale before he opens his mouth. I tell him I am. He keeps reaching out to touch me as he speaks. Wrist, shoulder, knee. I move left. He moves left. When he is momentarily distracted, another man at the table says, “You’d want to watch out; he’s after you.”

This is the part I hate. “Can you give me a dig out?” I ask, “Get him to back off.” He drains his sudsy pint glass and tells me with a smirk that I am on my own. I’m too annoyed with myself to be annoyed with him. I do not understand why I cannot simply say, “Please don’t touch me.”

If I lift and remove his hand, he will turn on me. From his bruised ego will emerge a scene of my making. I think it will spoil the night – I will spoil the night – without acknowledging that for me, it is already spoiled.

I go to the bathroom and then linger at the bar until he gets bored and finds another woman who he is soon draped across. This interaction didn’t even touch the walls of the worst incidences of unwanted physical contact in my life. There have been times when I have been terrified and left in pain from the tussle.

Yet I am a high-contact kind of gal, bursting with the need to show people how I feel about them. For people who need personal space, I just use really intense, adoring eye contact, my chin resting in my hands as they speak.

I am not sure if it is a tiredness that has come over me, but I find myself increasingly having the guileless need for proximity, like a puppy. In a community meeting, I put my arm along the back of someone’s chair as they speak. Though his demeanour and flow are unchanged, my hand moves back to my lap. After a match, my elbow hooks tightly into that of a fellow volunteer as we walk back to our cars in the biting wind. Again, though he does nothing to make me think he is uncomfortable, worried that it’s a bit much, my arm unhooks.

Commiserating with someone, I squeeze his right arm with my left hand as I pass him. In whatever way we move slowly away from each other, my hand trails down his arm and our fingers graze off each other before finally breaking away. In class, I want to rub my thumb over the cheek of the woman beside me after she has made an impassioned critique of a piece of writing as a way of saying, “Well done, pal. You’re a genius.”

[ Do I look like a soft target? Do I give off the sad vibes of a person who can be inconvenienced?Opens in new window ]

Instead, after class, I tell her, “Well done, pal. You’re a genius.” We may be shackled when it comes to physical expression, but we are effusive when it comes to verbal affection. A week later, she throws out an “I love you,” over a parking meter as we say goodbye, though we only met a few months ago. I know then that she would not have minded me cupping her face in admiration, though the lecturer might have found it distracting.

[ Hugging is good for your health, but most people are terrible at itOpens in new window ]

In the cinema, my best friend reaches her hand towards me. Not for the popcorn, but to knit her fingers through mine. I flip her hand and kiss the back of it. We release each other as the movies starts. Thankfully for everyone in the auditorium, I don’t have the urge to hand-feed her Maltesers.

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