In-laws ignore wish not to be hugged

DEAR CAROLYN: How do I deal with my in-laws who insist on hugging me, despite my many statements that I’m not a hugger?

To be fair, I’ve been grumpy about this in the past and could have handled it in a kinder way, and I understand it’s their way of expressing affection. But now it’s turned into a joke at my expense and they continue to needle (and hug!) me.

My husband knows I’m uncomfortable and he’s shut the jokes down on occasion, but he also thinks I should just put up with the occasional hug since they’re harmless and wellmeaning.

I absolutely dread visits. I’m fine with a goodbye hug, but I find "greeting hugs" or "good morning hugs" or any of the others overwhelming. There are usually a million other things going on (the dog barking, people asking a million questions, I’m burned out from the drive, and so on) and the last thing I want is to be touched or have more attention called to the fact that I’m a weirdo. I say that endearingly, for the record.

— Grumpy DEAR GRUMPY: What is "harmless and well-meaning" about knowingly making someone uncomfortable? And topping it off with a dollop of ridicule?

I do feel the pain of the overcorrected; it sometimes feels lately as if everything that was once normal or brushed off as harmless is suddenly terribly wrong.

But the answer to that isn’t to pressure everyone who expresses discomfort into shutting back up and brushing things off again like the (notso) good old days. If something is indeed small enough to brush off, then that’s something for each of us to decide for ourselves. That is, overall, the necessary and important societal change that’s in progress: toward understanding we all have equal say over ourselves socially, instead of assuming those deemed "other" have less social power and need to hide, contort and conform to make things easier on everyone else.

And that’s what your husband is asking you to do — he’s presuming to decide for you that your complaints aren’t significant and your needs are "other," so your claim to your own body is less valid than his parents’ mainstream claim to hug it.

And that’s just, wow.

He’s their kid, he loves them, so it’s easy to see how he wouldn’t see things this way. No doubt he’s thinking, moms + hugs = good! — and he’d never dream of saying outright, "My parents are entitled to touch you against your will because I’ve decided it’s OK."

But that’s functionally what he’s saying.

So he needs to hear explicitly from you: that access to your body is yours to control, not his or theirs. No matter how "harmless" he thinks the touching is, or they mean it to be, the fact of undermining your body autonomy is never harmless. And the harm is manifesting in your dreading his family now, dreading their touch and now their ridicule just because you’re different from the rest of them.

What you ask him for next is deceptively simple. You will enforce your own boundaries on your own body — because that’s your job. From him, all you request is calm, kind, open and unflinching support for that autonomy because it covers both hugs and needling. This means you are not asking him to be pro- or anti-hug, or pro- or anti-parents — just pro-one’s body is one’s own. I mean it when I say "simple"; it’s not a hard thing to stand up for, once a person signs onto the concept. "Mom, dad, [spouse] decides who hugs [spouse]." It’s a right they take for granted, I’m guessing, and exercise freely themselves in every part of their lives.