Skinship

My wife and I had an interesting conversation today with the Korean teenager living with us. After dinner we somehow got on the topic of intimacy. It was a great conversation, nothing explicit, but open and mature. He used the term skinship that we had never heard before. He referred to his friends as his skinship friends. We thought he might be saying kinship, so I googled it after we got home. Apparently, it means a physical non-sexual relationship. It could mean the physical relationship between a parent and a child, like when you bathe an infant, but it could also be used like he did ... between friends. So if you have a friend over to watch a movie and use his/her leg to lay your head down on, in a non-sexual way, that is skinship. He said it like he does with our dog, it is comforting and physical, but not sexual.