Against the polite hug

A vast majority of hugs in the world are "polite", where neither party has particular affection for each other. And I've begun to eliminate those (from my life at least)

“A lot of the hugs look rather flimsy for a reunion”. This was one of the first things my wife said at the 10th year reunion of my IIMB class in 2016. It had barely been fifteen minutes since we had got there, but the pertinent observer that she (also) is, she had already made a lasting remark.

For context, she had finished her own MBA from a European school earlier that year, and from my (pertinent) observations there, they did have a strong hugging culture going there. “Well, to be honest, we didn’t have much of a hugging culture here on campus when we were here”, I said, “and so this may not come naturally to a lot of us. People are hugging not because they want to but because they think it’s expected of them”.

In other words, the reason the hugs looked “flimsy” was that they were “polite hugs”. Where you give the other person a hug not out of any sense of affection (which is what a hug needs to be for) but because it would be deemed impolite if you didn’t offer one. And because you don’t really want to hug them, you make a feeble attempt at it, resulting in a hug that isn’t satisfying to anybody.

Fundamentally, a hug is a wholly intimate gesture, where you are putting the entirety of your torso in contact with that of the other person (“entirety” being subject to relative heights, girths, etc. but you know what I’m getting at). You are making yourself wholly vulnerable in the process (in the case of people like Afzal Khan, literally so)

And so (political reasons apart - I’ll leave aside these asides now), you hug someone if and only if you feel truly affectionate towards them. This, however, is the ideal case.

Over a period of time, I’ve observed a rise in the number of what I would call “polite hugs” - where you hug someone not because you feel any sort of affection, but because it just “seems like the right thing to do”.

This can happen for various reasons:

• Three people meet. Two pairs are mutually affectionate and hug. Now it will be awkward if “the triangle is not completed”. And so one pair hugs even if they don’t feel anything towards each other

• The environment / milieu demands it. I know this is a weird one, but sometimes you could be in a place where it’s common for people to hug, and so if you’re meeting someone there, you offer a hug even if you wouldn’t ordinarily want to hug them

• You assume that hugging is “the done thing”, even if you don’t particularly feel like it. And so you compromise with a weak hug.

• You’re not sure if the other person wants to hug, and you don’t feel any particular affection. However, just to make sure you don’t offend, you go ahead and offer the hug anyway. It’s almost as if the “polite hug” is the least bad option in this case.

• There can be culture clashes - like there is this one branch of my family where hugging is rather common. And so when that branch meets people from the rest of the branches (where hugging is almost never done). the latter branch knows of the “obligation to hug”, resulting in weak hugs.

The one setting I’ve purposely left out here is the “one sided hug” where one person really feels affectionate towards the other, but the affection is not returned. In this case, the weak hug is a feature rather than a bug because the person who is really affectionate gets feedback that this may not be a good person to shower their affections on.

The problem with the polite hug is that it is neither here nor there. It is not that the fleeting moment of body contact will create any sort of affection in either party. You are so conscious in the process that even if there is some benefit you get from the hug, you are unaware of it (unless you’re tabulating your own Mata Amrita Index). And because you didn’t really want to hug, there is a brief discomfort as well which can wash away any potential benefit.

Hence, of late I’ve been following a bimodal policy - hug someone if and only if I’m feeling truly affectionate towards them. For all other times, there is this wonderful invention for a formal greeting involving minimal bodily contact - the handshake.

So far (it’s early days - it’s not that I meet *that* many people socially) it’s served me well, I think. When I’ve chosen to hug, or found that the other person is coming in for a strong hug, it’s given me that moment (or few) of comfort and connection with the other person.

If only more people were to adopt this policy, we could eliminate the scour that is the weak hug. Then again, the challenge I see here is signaling - how do you tell the other person that you’re willing to hug if and only if it’s a strong one? These thoughts are for another day.

PS: For the longest time I used to equate “side hugs” (where the torsos touch side-to-side rather than front on, with one arm each on each other’s backs) to weak hugs. However, I’ve changed my opinion on this now - at least where two men are involved, the side hug can be fairly intimate and strong.