I used to hug people, but I don ‘t anymore. Just my wife.
I see what you did there.
Here is what Mona Charen ( a WOMAN ) wrote in an article for National Review:
SOURCE: https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/joe-biden-touching-social-norms/
(EXCERPT)
There is a wealth of psychological literature showing that skin-to-skin contact is critical for the normal mental development of human infants. All but the most fragile preterm babies do better when cuddled in their mothers’ arms than in incubators. Studies have shown that babies in Romanian orphanages who were provided with nutrition and clean diapers but were rarely held or spoken to, grew into emotionally stunted children.
In childhood too, physical contact is critical for children’s well-being. When fathers roughhouse with their young children, the kids are better able to regulate their emotions, including aggression, and are found to be more popular with their peers than are children who lack this kind of play.
Our need to touch and be touched never subsides. Chronic loneliness has been found to be as harmful to health as smoking. Studies have found that hugs don’t just relieve stress and release oxytocin (the bonding hormone), they can also reduce susceptibility to the common cold, lower blood pressure, and diminish pain. And when humans pet animals, both experience physiological benefits. Even just holding hands with a loved one while enduring a painful medical procedure has been found to make the experience more bearable. When close couples hold hands, their heart rates and brain waves tend to synchronize.
Most of us just aren’t designed to live the kind of solitary lives that excessive entanglement with technology is encouraging. We are social and also tactile creatures. Our recent social trend away from marriage and toward silicone companions is the equivalent of taking people away from a roaring fireplace surrounded by loved ones and placing them in solitary steel and glass pods. Let’s not lose sight of our affective natures even as we police the excessively handsy among us.
I was never the huggy type, however twenty years ago at my workplace the women there would come up and hug the stuffing out of me and a few would hunt me down and tell the dirtiest jokes you ever heard. Most of these ladies have retired and the new ones keep to themselves. They were from a different generation.
There are two of three women that I know at work that I will hug, mainly because I have been friends with them outside the workplace for 30+ years, otherwise I never instigate a hug. Outside these three women I hug my wife, Mom, mother-in-law, sister and daughter and usually my nieces will come up and hug me when they visit, otherwise no hugs. Today’s women have lost their minds, it is just not worth it.
I wanted to brush up, so I bought “How to Hug.”
It’s what I get for buying books unseen. Turns
out “How to Hug” is the eleventh volume in a set
of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia.