Touching the grief: does affectionate touch protect intimacy in couples who lost their child?

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b3199883

Although child loss has detrimental consequences for individual well-being, its impact on bereaved parents’ romantic relationships is still understudied. This research focused on one of the most frequent relationship behaviors, namely affectionate touch, in relationships. Accordingly, the difference in affectionate touch in bereaved couples who experienced child loss during pregnancy, labor, or afterward vs. nonbereaved couples and the roles of affectionate touch and its similarity across partners in the couples’ intimacy was examined. In total, 483 bereaved parents (228 couples, 27 individuals) and 523 non-bereaved participants (258 couples, 7 individuals) from Turkey participated in a seven-day diary study. Although bereaved and non-bereaved men reported equal affectionate touch, bereaved women’s affectionate touch was lower than non-bereaved women’s. Despite this discrepancy, multilevel analysis results revealed that affectionate touch mostly benefited both genders’ intimacy in bereaved and non-bereaved couples. The Dyadic Response Surface Analyses results showed that rather than the similarity of affectionate touch across partners at any level, mutually high affectionate touch was positively related to intimacy. These findings highlight that bereaved and non-bereaved couples are more similar than different regarding affectionate touch’s relational gains, and affectionate touch could be a promising target in intervention programs aiming to buffer the negative consequences of child loss for bereaved parents.