THE HEALING TOUCH
Some people are willing to pay for cuddles — and it’s not what you might think
When Samantha Hess’s marriage ended five years ago, she felt she was lacking a basic human need: physical touch. As a woman in her late 20s living in Portland, Ore., she found plenty of men interested in dating, but sexual contact was not what she craved. She wanted something platonic.
“I was kind of an empty shell of touch deprivation,” she said. “I thought, ‘Why isn’t there a Starbucks for hugs, where do I go for that?’ So I realized that this is a thing that should exist.”
In 2014 Hess opened a shop, Cuddle Up to Me, where trained cuddlers hold, stroke and embrace customers in a non-sexual way.
While paying for touch may sound awkward or unnatural to those who get plenty of it from partners or other close connections, for some people it is an antidote to a culture where casual physical contact seems elusive. The percentage of adults living without a spouse or partner has risen in the past 10 years and the rise in onscreen interactions means more socializing takes place without even the possibility of touch. At the two-year-old website cuddlist.com, which has trained about 400 professional cuddlers and connects clients to providers around the U.S., “Most clients are under some level of duress: anxiety, stress, loss or need,” said co-founder Adam Lippin.
Some have a physical disability, post-traumatic stress or are on the autism spectrum, which can be a barrier to forming intimate relationships.
The benefits of touch are welldocumented, from 1950s experiments showing infant monkeys preferred more cuddly terry cloth “mothers” over wire mesh ones to 1980s Romanian orphanages full of touch-deprived children with severe emotional problems.
Studies show massage therapy to be associated with increased attentiveness, decreased depression and immune-system boosts. At cuddlist.com the average cost for an hour with a provider is US$80, and the site has logged more than 10,000 requests. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the business has a gender imbalance. Ninety-one per cent of cuddlist.com clients are male and three-quarters of its providers are female.
To explain why, Kassandra Brown, a cuddlist.com provider in Boulder, Colo., recalled a client who said, “I’m here because men aren’t allowed to touch anyone.”
She realized he was right. “They can’t touch men because that’s gay. They can’t touch women because that’s creepy. They can’t touch children because, well, everybody knows you’d be a pedophile if you touched a kid. So men can either touch a sexual partner or they can touch in violence.”
Mark Stone, a divorced holistic kinesiologist in Chicago, started going to a professional cuddler after realizing he didn’t know how to touch a woman in a non-sexual way.
“We so much embrace sexuality and we so much embrace sex in marriage and relationships with others that we lose that connection with just feeling safe in touching and holding,” said Stone, 53. “I think a lot of guys don’t know how to do that very well with their partners. They don’t know how to hold a physical non-sexual space with a partner.”
To differentiate from other, much older, professions that cater to the lonely, Lippin and his co-founder, Madelon Guinazzo, set strict rules on what does and doesn’t happen in a session. Client and cuddler talk by phone before meeting and agree at the outset that it will not turn sexual; either party can end a session at any time.
Clients can talk about almost anything during a session, though discussing sexual fantasies about the provider is off limits. But they can lean against the provider, hold hands or spoon while they talk.
While massage therapy might seem to be the perfect way to fulfil the need for touch, non-sexual cuddling addresses a deeper, more emotional need, pro cuddlers say.
“Massage therapy ethics are all about one-way touch,” said Annie Hopson, a Cuddlist provider in Ellicott City, Md., who is also a massage therapist. “There was not a way for (clients) to be OK with saying, ‘Could you hold me?’”
For some, being held by another person is a new experience. Steve Curry, of Northampton, Mass., who has spina bifida, said for much of his life, “as far as being in a touch relationship, most touch centred around my medical-care needs, not emotional needs.” He has two-hour cuddle sessions twice a month, and “it’s never enough.”
While most of Brown’s clients are middle-aged men, she has a couple of female clients in their 20s, including one who spends 90-minute sessions getting her head stroked while lying on Brown’s lap. “Both of them have said to me, ‘It’s really helped me to notice what I want and to ask for it, because in other parts of my life I do what others want me to do.’”
After pro cuddling, some clients say they’re more comfortable initiating touch with friends, or they no longer flinch when someone touches them casually.
Some one-on-one cuddlers host cuddle parties where strangers come together for a communal hug. Here, too, strict rules apply.
Pro cuddlers acknowledge arousal is an occupational hazard and say that’s not shameful as long as it is not pursued. If someone becomes turned on during a session, participants are advised to change to a position that is less stimulating.
“If there’s sexual chemistry does that mean you have to act on it?” said Lippin. “You notice it, you let it pass.”