How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Hug (Kind Of)

When I was seventeen, I decided I was going to be normal about hugs.

Until then, it was well known that I didn’t like to be touched. My high-school friends teased that they could feel me squirm away if they gently pressed my shoulder with one finger. My buddies from Guides and Scouts, friendly people who welcomed each other with warm embraces, respectfully shook my hand instead. People who already knew me taught newcomers to our company or drama department by their example.

It wasn’t — and still isn’t — that I didn’t enjoy the sensation of hugs. I just found them overwhelming, and I didn’t know how to respond.

To me, touch is a very intimate form of communication. I don’t like using it unless I’m completely comfortable with the other person, and being friends, even good friends, doesn’t always mean that level of comfort.

It was even more confusing when I was a teenager. For the first time, my peers and I might have crushes or lust or goodness knows what (I sure didn’t), and I didn’t know how to manage the messages I was sending out, or if I was even allowed to think about that, or if I was ruining the hug by being worried about people being grossed out by reading sexual attraction into something I did, because of course no one would want that from me.

Even now, as an adult, I feel like I tolerate touch for much shorter durations than other people. It’s too much for me to interpret for too long. Because (as far as I can tell) I don’t like it as much as those around me, I also have trouble communicating back in the same way.

When I was seventeen, I understood that feeling these ways about hugs set me apart from the tactile, open people in my social circles. And sometimes, as my friendships developed, I started to feel comfortable enough sometimes to be okay with hugs from certain people. I wanted to be able to respond with the hugs that comforted them when they were sad or made them feel loved when they walked in. I didn’t want people to react when I hugged them as though it were a gesture as difficult and meaningful as donating a kidney.

But I’d been too good at setting my boundaries. “I don’t like hugs” had been easier than “I like hugs, but they often make me uncomfortable for a lot of different reasons.”

Instead, I told myself, whenever I met new people who were normal about hugs, I would simply pretend to be normal too. I wouldn’t cringe or wince when they touched me; I would get over myself the same way I had to get over the coldness of the water when I went swimming. Just like jumping into a pool, making that mental leap would be a shock, but once I got used to it, it would be great.

I had the opportunity during the summer after grade 12 when I joined a training theatre company full of young actors my own age. From the start, I told myself I’d accept any hug that I was offered. And I did.

Nobody was disgusted or bemused or suspicious. Nobody seemed to realize that I was running a computer program for hugging in my head, that I still fretted over how much pressure I was supposed to use and what distance there ought to be between us, etc. It was still obvious to me I didn’t enjoy hugs as much as everyone else seemed to — mine were never as spontaneous or passionate as my friends’ , but no one else seemed to care, or, if they did, they were too kind to show it.

I “passed” well enough that today, when someone mentions off-hand how they’d hug me except I don’t like hugs, friends from that theatre group are sometimes confused. Don’t get me wrong: there’s no one on Earth who considers me a hug monster*. But there are people who are surprised to learn that I’m uncomfortable enough with hugs to have a few generations of friends who, out of love, avoid touching me.

So, you might think, is that the end of the story? Did I get rid of my hug antipathy by believing I could?

I don’t think so.

Accepting most hugs — even from friends whom I trust and love — is still an effort for me. In theatre, one of my chosen fields, the culture is much more touchy-feely than that of other social networks to which I belong. In university, grad and undergrad, I swung back the other way: although I stopped saying “Sorry, I don’t like hugs,” I didn’t feel obliged to pretend to enjoy them like everyone else did. I became all right with deciding not to join in social activities that made more gregarious, open folks happier than they made me.

But here’s the thing: it’s worth the effort to accept all the appropriate, positive touching I’m offered — hand squeezes, arms around the shoulders, and, yes, friendly hugs — if it means that the people I care about aren’t too hesitant to accept or offer the hugs that really do mean something to me.

So, although I’ve always appreciated what hugs actually mean to the people giving them, I try to weigh that information more heavily these days. I stay attuned to my own moods — do I feel like hugging people today? am I in a good place for sharing and trusting? — and learn to be happy than people I care about are happy, even if we don’t want exactly the same thing right now. And I accept hugs, but I know it’s okay if they don’t make me feel all the pleasant hug feelings. I don’t have to call attention to it unless I want to.

Always hating hugs or always accepting hugs is easy as a rule, but neither takes into account what I actually want and how I really feel. Those things are going to change from moment to moment, and only I can monitor them.

* To be fair, my boyfriend might, if he weren’t more likely to spontaneously speak in tongues than use the phrase “hug monster.”