Nope. I usually know when a hug will be good and I'm ready to be wrong. I'm not going to pussyfoot my way through every slightly-more-intimate interaction I take in this life.
Thanks tonyarkles, and to clarify: I'm not saying that it's OK for me to indiscriminately go around hugging people, either. I'm saying that in general the only people I hug are people that I know well enough to know that a hug will be OK from both sides.
Meh, I just tell people hugs make me feel uncomfortable. Some people are fine, some demand a big hug to help me out of my shell. Either way it's a win.
I'd love to hug but that is pretty much suicide in the workplace. We are taught to never hug or touch someone and that's probably good for lots of people and situations, but I do miss people giving me hugs.
From a game theoretic perspective, hugging too briefly could be optimal. Even if the majority of people prefer a hug longer than 5 seconds, you might view the slight gain from having hugged them perfectly as not worth the risk that you creep them out.
On the other hand, one might consciously want to weed out people uncomfortable with a hug of that duration.
TL;DR: have friends who hug, go to warm cultures and metta meditation
A friend of mine years ago went to an alternative school for a year. He transformed as a person and made it a principle to hug his friends. While I was skeptical at first, I quite quickly had the same principle. If I am within my circle of friends I always say beforehand that I am going to hug them if I don't know them well enough. When they refuse, fine, when they don't, I hug them. It is different when I am in other social circles, then I judge it more on a per social circle basis. If I meet someone by myself and had a good time, there is always a hug. If you want to get some 'practice' in, I suggest going on vacation to Italy and make some Italian friends. Hugging is normal if you let it be normal.
What also might help is metta meditation. I remember that before metta meditation I did not hug my parents. But then I read the book Search Inside Yourself written by a Google employee. I took the instructions for metta there a bit too much on the intense side, since I was really putting myself in the shoes of my parents and I envisioned how their whole life must've been like and kept asking myself what made them happy. After that I noticed that I wanted to tell them that I love them every time I saw them, but that's a bit too cheesy to my taste, so I decided to hug them instead. Interestingly, even after a few weeks my dad still felt a bit uncomfortable with it, so I dropped the practice with him. But I still hug my mom. For me personally, it has been a mini transformation because I never used to hug her, and now I hug her every time I see her.
Reading this, I'm quite surprised on how I transformed from a completely non-touchy person to a hugger. As a result, I am not experiencing a hugging crisis. I get my 2 hugs per day in :)
Generally speaking, if it's business, no hugging, unless the person is also a good friend. If someone I had met exactly once before decided to hug me the second time, and it was in a work context, I would put them solidly in the creeper bucket. Sorry.
(Demographic disclaimer: I am a woman and an engineering manager. Also Australian which I think means I have a slightly bigger personal space than the average American.)
I choose not to "miss to death" anyone/anything. When it happens to hug someone it doesn't make much difference to me if we haven't seen each other for over a year or a minute.
Nope. I usually know when a hug will be good and I'm ready to be wrong. I'm not going to pussyfoot my way through every slightly-more-intimate interaction I take in this life.
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