When it comes to PDA, or public displays of affection, what are you comfortable with? Holding hands? A light kiss? How about a passionate kiss at sunset on the end of a pier somewhere in Florida? Or is that starting to get gag-worthy? 

PDA is often a touchy subject in married couples (pun intended -- my bad). But seriously, it can be difficult to find a level of public affection that you’re both comfortable with. Research has some interesting findings on the use of PDA, how it can help marriages, and some ground rules to bear in mind.

If PDA Includes Sexual Behavior, That’s an Issue

Ultimately this discussion of PDA is about what you each are comfortable with and how to work with that in your marriage. We want you to maximize the amount of affection you show and experience.

But there are limits here. There’s a line crossed from a public display of affection to a public display of sexual behavior. The former is a great way to show love to your spouse; the latter is not such a good idea.

I think there are some clearly sexual behaviors: touching your spouse’s private parts in public with your hand is sexual — that is indecent in any public context. That’s immodest. It is not respecting your spouse. It is objectifying your spouse in front of others. Think about it this way: intimacy is about vulnerability. The greater the vulnerability the greater the safety required. You can’t offer safety for this level of vulnerability in public. So if it’s not safe to be this vulnerable, don’t be that intimate.

But there is a grey area. For example, kissing. In North America, a kiss goes all the way from a peck on the cheek — that’s probably the most innocuous — to a full fledged French kiss where we have tongues playing tonsil hockey and so on. At this stage you have to respect a couple things.

First is your culture. Our podcast, at the time of recording, has been downloaded in 169 countries. In some of them, the peck on the cheek might earn you jail time or at least attention from a policeman if it was seen. In others, if you didn’t actually greet your spouse with this if you reunited in public (say, coming off an airplane) then your family would wonder what was wrong with your marriage and start worrying about the two of you. So keep your culture in mind.

The second comes back to sexuality. If your kissing is becoming sexual then we go back to the previous cautionary note about respecting each other and respecting the people around you. As the Bible says, “All things are lawful, but not all things are helpful” (1 Cor. 10:23). It might be legal. It probably isn’t helpful to anyone.

So let’s establish those two general guidelines: “is it sexual?” and “what does your culture allow?” as starting points. Now as we go through the research keep in mind that from now on we’re making the assumption that we’re looking at decent PDA.

Let’s actually look at PDA and relationship satisfaction because we want to be focusing on marriage. And then let’s look at factors affecting PDA inside each marriage, and then how to find the balance.

PDA and Relationship Satisfaction

The research shows that both private and public physical affection increase relationship satisfaction.

Expressing affection and love for your spouse through a variety of means is unquestionably a good thing. We’ve looked previously at the concept of the Five Love Languages, of which physical touch is one, but today’s research suggests touch is something everyone should be using.

Here are a couple of studies. First, Kent & El Alayi[i] surveyed women in committed relationships and found that they experience higher relationship satisfaction, relationship commitment and feelings of intimacy when private and public displays of affection were part of their marriage.

Most couples believe that physical touch is a good thing. That’s obvious to us but it’s not to everyone (we’ll get to that later) but "research has shown that individuals believe physical affect...