The Dubious Act of Hugging

I’m not sure how I feel about hugging.

I’m not talking about hugging the ones who matter most—the wife, the kids, the parents. I don’t think twice about people I would donate a kidney to. The hugs in that context are as effortless as breathing. All other hugging prospects, though, are touch and go. Like, a party where I’ve met most of the people once or twice? I’d sooner do the Hokey Pokey in a field of land mines.

I can point to any number of reasons—an intense need for personal space, introversion, insecurity, lack of self-worth, the uncertainty over whether I remembered to put on deodorant. My mind does all kinds of mental gymnastics when a potential hug is imminent: I always remember deodorant, but this morning the kids were a pubescent horror show and I was stressed. Did I give the pitters the old 1-2? Better safe than sorry. Opt for the head nod and live to fight another day.

Awkwardness is another risk. One time I went for the hug and was met with a handshake. Dear god, nothing has made me feel guiltier of a violent crime than that moment. I stammered and said, “Oh… yeah… sorry, I didn’t…”

“No, uh, we can…we can do the hug thing…” the poor bastard said.

I should have committed to the retreat, but I relented, and we went with the embrace-run-amok. While it was awful, I will say that we both had the good taste to crane our necks with all the gusto of Linda Blair in the The Exorcist to avoid eye contact on the dismount. They don’t have awards for these things, but if there were, we might have won for Best Performance in a Tragicomedy.

On the left: the feeling we aimed for. On the right: the feeling we got.

My wife is the opposite. Hugging is her native language. Yes, hugs for friends and family, but also for anyone she’s just met. In that way, she’s one of the most disarming people I’ve come across. If there’s a hall of fame, she’s in it.

Unsurprisingly, her friend, Katie, would be in the hall of fame right beside her. Katie is also my friend, but because they have been friends since preschool, it seems like Becky should get dibs. But I digress…

Katie is short in stature and perhaps a little quieter than my wife. The contrast is important. Few people would meet my wife and be surprised that she’s coming in for the hug. Katie’s hugs are surprising, though, because they’re initially unassuming yet profoundly powerful. Remember when Dick Cheney accidentally shot that guy in the face? If that guy had been getting a hug from Katie at the time, he’d probably have walked away unscathed.

Similarly, we have a friend named Andrea Jo, and she squeezes the life into you. That’s the thing about huggers who know what they’re doing. They possess an intangible quality, an energetic gift that thwarts the anxieties of modern day life. You watch the news all day and learn that hopheads are dumping fentanyl-laced cocaine down the drain, which is being lapped up by coyotes, so your anxiety is pumping battery acid through your varicose veins a gallon a second every time you hear them howl in the distance. A hug from Andrea Jo makes the baying and barking of fentanyl-crazed coyotes sound like an episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

There’s also our friend Jen, a wonderful woman who spends her days as a death doula. She ushers people to the big sleep and (I imagine) sees them off by wrapping them up in hugs that approximate something close to high art.

While I’m at it, I’d be remiss not to also mention Joni who our family met because our kids were on the same rock climbing team. She could hug you in such a way that you felt you’d been promoted from casual friend to dear family member, the kind she’d invite to an all-expense paid destination wedding in the Maldives.

And it’s not just a woman thing. I have another friend named Keith who deserves a shoutout. He’s six-and-a-half-feet tall, and he’s basically a 250-pound human smile. Every time I go in for a handshake, he slaps my hand away like it’s a snake and immediately brings it in for a Polar Bear hug. Related: Keith often sports a t-shirt that reads, ‘This Doesn't Count As A Sasquatch Sighting.’

This is what a professional hugger does when you try to sneak in a handshake over a hug.

The effortlessness of advanced huggers is baffling to me. It’s a quality I admire even as I’m narrowing my eyes at its execution. It’s a mystery, and I want answers. To that end, when I’m trying to figure something out—whether I should zig or zag, how to confront death, how to make sense of my insecurities about what should be a simple embrace—I usually turn to writing. Often it comes out as a personal essay, other times as a horror story involving clowns who need to be checked for hernias (maybe I’ll share that one some day…) and in this case I channeled Shel Silverstein and wrote a little poem:

The Greatest Hugger in All the World

Sunny Granger was a hugging master 
'Til she lost her arms in a bowling disaster. 

Undaunted, she made the best of this affliction 
And still squeezed loved ones with conviction. 
She used her legs to wrap them tight 
And clenched her gams with all her might. 

This worked great—until her legs were lost 
To a nasty bite of glacial frost. 

Now, a cynical person just might think 
That Sunny's hugs became extinct. 
Sure, a hug without limbs is pretty puzzling. 
But Sunny just cuddled close and swiveled her neck—called it hug-like nuzzling. 

What happened next... it fills me with terror, it overwhelms me with dread! 
How her head was lopped off in that collision with a sled. 
And because her body was removed from her head, 
Everyone assumed Sunny was good and dead. 

Sure, yes, okay, she'd been decapitated, 
Which made her hugging ways more complicated, 
But still her affections found a way. 
Disregard what the naysayers say. 

Her smile became her warm embrace— 
As good a hug as you'd get any place. 
And she cast hugging smiles all day long. 
Until something—again—went horribly wrong. 

Her lips fell off, a unique condition, 
The result of a ragtime whistling competition. 
So she resorted to hugging with nothing but a look. 
When it came to being loving, that was all it took. 

So all was good and all was fine... 
Until the mishap with the porcupine. 
The rodent had never seen a lipless head with loving eyes, 
And its razor-sharp quills fired in surprise. 

No arms, no legs, not even a neck, 
No lips, no eyes—an anatomical wreck! 
You might be wondering: "What on earth 
Was all that hugging and loving and kindness worth?" 

Well, after all the hugs Sunny had distributed, 
Those who'd been hugged came along and contributed 
To rebuild her pieces and assemble her parts. 
There were doctors, inventors, and Masters of Arts, 
Circus clowns, hobos, folks from the loony bin, 
The loneliest girl in all the land and her Siamese twin. 
Lepers and lost souls, she'd hugged the lot, 
And they came to show her it was not all for naught. 

So remember Sunny Granger and love with everything you got, 
And have faith that your hugs will create an untie-able love knot.

---

One of my issues with hugs is that they’re sometimes preceded by small talk and other “pleasantries,” which, for an introvert like me, is a rock solid set up for disaster. If you’ve experienced any such disasters, I’d love to hear about ‘em. Either way, thanks for reading.