Physical intimacy/skinship and appropriateness

Many so-called modern people grew up learning, that physical contact is something that has to be avoided in every context that is supposed to seem professional, task-oriented or even just normal. Touch and especially appreciating it is treated as something that belongs to the bedroom of a formally agreed on monogamous couple. Everything else is often viewed as strangely overstepping boundaries, awkwardly invading personal spaces or forcing an unwanted sight onto people. This is at least a common perspective that is often transported with the label 'normality'. It can be subsumed in the following artificially formulated, but nevertheless obviously widely accepted equation: skinship = sexuality

Many people feel uncomfortable because of that in different regards:

People who like to touch others are perceived as 'perverts' for as little a thing as touching a newly met person's limbs while talking to them.
People who like to be touched feel somehow ashamed of the pleasure they get from a random human's (sometimes even accidentally applied) skin contact.
People who like to kiss their partners all the time are being told to stop it because it disturbs those around them.
People who like to watch others expressing their nonsexual appreciation feel like perverts.

What happens now when people socialized as stated above enter a group that values skinship?
They probably need some time to adapt their perception of appropriateness and to accept, that gentle touch is possible without any kind of sexual implication. It is much harder for them in these new surroundings to differentiate friendship, love and sexual attraction. When one of the pillars of known normality is taken away, the whole construct starts to shake. Where do the boundaries between the concepts of love and friendship even lay? Does it all depend on where to locate sexual attraction? Or is love the underlying, timeless feeling of appreciating another existence, whereas friendship is the action of maintaining an active interpersonal relationship built on this before-mentioned emotion and where the sexual attraction in this model fits is the decision of every single individual?

Whatever may be the answer, or rather an answer, to those questions, the cognitive framework depends on concepts like appropriateness to let us function in social situations. It should not surprise, if somebody has difficulties adapting to a new appropriateness, that can't even be communicated clearly, because it is just in the process of emerging and changes dynamically from day to day and from person to person. It takes lots of mental freedom and emotional capacity to freely adapt to such a concept, so nobody should expect it to work out easily forever.