Close encounters: Are we getting enough hugs?

In LA, even the drug dealers are fond of a warm embrace. But is it a friendly gesture or an invasive and unwanted act of intimacy, asks Jessica Bennett

Group hug: People attend a ‘cuddle party’ in New York, an event where people can experience consensual physical contact (Getty)

I recently found myself trapped in the arms of a shaman. It was a hug – and a consensual hug, let me be clear – albeit an unexpected one. I had held out my hand to offer this person a shake, as we were meeting professionally for the first time. He rejected my hand and instead pulled me in for a warm hug. He smelled amazing.

A few seconds later, I was preparing to pull back, and yet there we stayed in an embrace. And stayed. And stayed. By the time the hug was finished, I was so panicked about the emails piling up in my inbox that I was practically convulsing.

“It takes forever for him to leave a party,” the shaman’s assistant said, rolling her eyes.

I am a New Yorker. If the involvement of a shaman hadn’t tipped you off already, this hug occurred in Los Angeles.

But the shaman was not an outlier. In my entirely unscientific research, this is the way that some people in Los Angeles – you know, the cliched touchy feely types the city has always been associated with – seem to greet each other.

“People call me out on this, but people have been putting their hands out to shake – and I’m like, ‘I don’t actually shake hands, can I hug you?’” says Tanya Khani, a publicist in Sherman Oaks and a lifelong Angeleno, who says her hugs typically last between seven and 10 seconds, depending “on how deep you want to drop into it”.

Alex Bhattacharji, a former magazine editor who was born and raised in New York and moved to Los Angeles in 2016, says: “It’s as if greeting someone with a warm smile and handshake is like flipping someone the bird or telling them they smell.”

Averill Healey is another recent Los Angeles transplant. “I got a hug from a girl waiting in line to use the bathroom last weekend,” says Healey, who likened the embrace of her new neighbours to being in “a large supportive cult”.

Hugging can release oxytocin, which is associated with happiness, lower blood pressure and less stress

“People I have only met once cling onto me like long lost friends the second time I see them,” she says. “I actually can’t remember how I used to greet people but I know that it wasn’t this physical.”

Call it the “LA hug”.

It’s easy to see how, in the land of sunshine and Moon Juice, heart chakras and alternative milks – where most people spend most of their lives in their vehicles – there would be a common need for, well, human contact.

“So often, people will say, ‘Oh my gosh, I needed that hug,’” Khani says.

“They’re gluten deprived,” quips Maddie Corman, a writer and actor in New York.

As Amma, a Hindu spiritual leader who has been called “the hugging saint”, may tell you: Hugging is a natural human need. And it has all sorts of health benefits. Hugging can release oxytocin, which is associated with happiness, lower blood pressure and less stress. (And Amma would know: She has travelled around the world offering her hugs to some 37 million people.)

‘It’s not that people don’t hug in New York. But when we do, it’s often quick and to the point’ (Getty)

Sara Wilson, a Los Angeles transplant from Toronto, says she first noticed the distinctiveness of the Los Angeles embrace when she would pass through on vacation or to visit friends.

“People would rush towards each other in the street and have these incredibly theatrical hellos. It just struck me,” she says. “And then I realised, ‘Ohhh, they’re actors’.”

But they weren’t all actors.

Some of them were freelancers, working at coworking spaces and coffee shops around town, where the distinction between “business” and “casual” can be as subtle as the material of yoga pants.

Still others had office jobs, as Wilson does, at places where employees were encouraged to “bring your whole self to work” and “be vulnerable” with colleagues – part of a Silicon Valley mantra that had made its way south.

Perhaps it was only a matter of time then, that Wilson, now a freelance digital strategist, found herself offering the same kind of hugs – to colleagues, clients, her trainer.

“It was just like, ‘Oh nice to meet you – hug,’” she said. “And it didn’t happen all the time, but eventually I noticed I was initiating it. Now when I go to business meetings, 99 per cent of the time I’m hugging.”

I’m what I like to consider a warm and affectionate person, but it can be a very strange thing to hug someone – anyone – on first meeting

Wilson’s friend Jonas Bell Pasht, a film and television producer also from Toronto, says that such embraces have become so much “a part of the nature of” his interactions in Los Angeles that “at a certain point you just go with it”. He noted how that had been the case recently, at a pitch meeting with six others, each of whom he greeted with a hug – twice.

“I have to tell you, over the last 24 hours I’ve been taking an inventory of all the people I don’t particularly like who I’m giving these wonderful hugs to,” Bell Pasht says. “And it just doesn’t add up.”

It particularly doesn’t add up in an era in which many are quite conscious of the way that an unwanted hug can make other people feel. At Antioch College, in Ohio – a campus that pioneered “affirmative consent” policies in the 1990s – friends now ask permission before giving hugs.

In 2017, in a case involving sexual harassment claims against a California county sheriff, a court ruled that hugging could, when it was both unwelcome and pervasive, create an abusive work environment.

“I’m what I like to consider a warm and affectionate person, but it can be a very strange thing to hug someone – anyone – on first meeting,” says Bhattacharji, who lives in Eagle Rock. “Not even friends of friends, but random people at a work event. And it can be particularly odd for someone like me, a straight cis man who tries to be very aware of how such unwanted gestures can make women uncomfortable, to be pulled into an embrace by a female I’m meeting for the first time.”

It’s not that people don’t hug in New York. But when we do, it’s often quick and to the point: a handshake leading into a quick embrace (the “bro hug,” as Bell Pasht puts it); a perfunctory one-armed wrap around the back; or an efficient two-armed squeeze – in and out – before you each part ways, because, for God’s sake, we have stuff to do.

“I arrived in LA in a leather jacket with an ‘if you touch me, I will cut you’ look on my face,” says Andrea Bendewald, an actor and healer originally from New York. “In New York, you’re around people all the time. You’re sardined in a subway car. All you want is your own space and thoughts.”

Cut to Los Angeles, and “the sun is shining, everybody is in their cars, there is all this space,” says Bendewald, who now hosts “goddess circles” in Los Angeles, which sometimes include her childhood best friend Jennifer Aniston. “It’s much more, ‘I want to meet community’. ‘I want to collaborate.’ So you come out here looking for your tribe, like, ‘How can I connect with you?’”

Hug or handshake or a bit of both? (Getty)

One way: A lengthy, drawn-out embrace that sometimes feels longer than a Martin Scorsese movie.

“Oh, they’re endless. Some people you hug and you end up having a conversation in there,” Bendewald says.

She noted that if you want to really lean into it, you can try the “heart chakra” approach: left shoulder to left shoulder, so that you and the subject of your hug’s hearts are touching.

There are even regional dialects to the hug: “I would say the most distinct hugging community is on the west side: Venice, Santa Monica,” says Khani, who was born and raised in Los Angeles.

In Venice, even the drug dealers hug.

“The most striking hug experience I’ve had in LA was after buying shrooms,” says one 20-something friend who lives there. “The female dealer gives roughly three-minute embraces after each transaction.”

For Khani, such intimacies have nothing to do with mind-altering substances. “I would say there’s an intuitiveness to the city that allows people to experience each other in a much deeper way,” she says.

This New Yorker will have to disagree.

© The New York Times