What's funny is that, though, we expect it from dating couples, many of us drop this open affection after being married for a while.
Why does this happen?
Our experience with couples shows us that it often is a difference in love languages. Often one spouse feels and gives love physically naturally. The other spouse often expresses and receives love in another way.
The trouble is this: the non-affectionate spouse WAS affectionate while dating and even early on in marriage.
Two suggestions:
1. The spouse who feels loved by physical touch in public (and at home) needs to express to the other what this provides for them.
This is not nagging. This is explaining how receiving touch makes you feel emotionally as well as how it makes you respond, then, to your spouse. Since they don't feel this way naturally, you have to explain how it makes you feel.
2. The other spouse needs to learn a foreign language.
We each speak different languages in love. To one person hand-holding is like saying "I love you." To another if you don't actually say "I love you" hand-holding doesn't rate. One person's love language is physical touch. The other's is words of affirmation. There are many forms of love languages.
The point is, that if you're the spouse who doesn't naturally speak physical affection, you'll need to do what people do when they learn a foreign language: learn how it works and practice speaking it, even when it feels awkward to you.
The goal, of course, is that if you want your spouse to understand your love, then you've got to learn to speak his or her language.
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