Opinion | Please Touch Me

A bumper crop of stylish dumbphones like the Light Phone and the Jasper Morrison-designed Punkt suggest that people are catching on. Facebook has reported having “teen problems,” with young users clicking “deactivate” by the millions, and none of my 20-something-year-old half siblings (of which I have many, thanks to another trend: divorce) have ever joined Twitter. Among my writer friends, a social media hiatus is as de rigueur as a Moleskine. And while I realize that “my own life” is a problematic test group, my husband recently quit Instagram even though his enthusiasm for it was the reason I joined that time-sucker in the first place. It has to be a sign.

“Offline” might be the new black, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to jump up from our sweet-and-sour-stained Crate and Barrel couches and into one another’s arms. Instead, people are turning to the experts for compensated touch.

When she founded Cuddle Up to Me in 2013, the professional hugger Samantha Hess had one treatment room in Portland, Ore., and spare time. Today, Ms. Hess has an expanded practice and five new employees. The New Jersey-based website RentAFriend.com has over 621,000 human companions available by the hour for company barbecues, class reunions and that all-important category of “hot air balloon.” And sex therapy is making waves as a viable — and potentially superior — option to couple’s counseling. In a Vanity Fair interview last year, the sex therapist Walter Brackelmanns said that the divorce rate in his practice was just 5 percent, which would suggest that sex therapy is effective, or at least sex therapy with Walter Brackelmanns was.

I’m far from the first person to consider the future of touch. The Atlantic asked, “Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?” The Guardian’s Paula Cocozza wondered, “Are We Living Through a Crisis of Touch?” The New York Times posited that “Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good.” Meanwhile, professional cuddling has gone from being a “no freaking way that exists” thing to a bona fide service that Siri can find you a local address for. Could the pendulum be swinging from “Don’t touch me!” to “Please touch me again”?

If trend forecasting is, indeed, a game of opposites, then I think we’ll see touch-deprivation check-in spots in public wellness centers where patients can go to be embraced. Executives will enroll in body language clinics where elders teach the nonverbal communication skills that have fallen out of use. Picture a return to “pheromone-based” dating, prolonged eye contact as the new Soul Cycle, skin-hunger regulated as diligently as our Fitbit steps. Hell, maybe ballroom dancing will even make a comeback, because if my experience in Mr. Paige’s fifth-grade extracurricular taught me anything, it’s that a chaperoned Viennese waltz can quickly teach you and your partner about the parameters of “good” touch.

And while I don’t yet understand how the leap will be made, I think that humans will move from spending most of their time thinking about sex to having some themselves.

If I’m right about any of this, you can buy me a nice big plate of fines de claire, my ex-boss’s currency of favor, and an aphrodisiac, I hear.