Sheltering at Home Week Six
Hugging. I like hugging my friends. I like hugging my kids. And, wow, hugging a grandchild — there’s nothing quite like it.
Hugs — you see them everywhere these days. At least you used to. On pre-coronavirus TV, talk show hosts welcomed guests with the obligatory hug. Reality show contestants exchanged showy hugs with mentors the moment they met each other. Prefunctory hugs were routinely exchanged by sweaty basketball players post-game. And on the street: crowds of teenagers hugged each other hello and good-bye.
Fake Hugs
Why does this hug-everybody trend bug me?
Because so often it doesn’t seem genuine. How can it be? A hug signifies intimacy, and how can you feel intimate with a person you’ve just met or barely know?
It’s touchy-feely kumbaya, this profligate hugging trend that
has found its way somehow into the American armamentarium of social niceties. It’s “let’s acts as though we live in a world where everybody gets along just fine. Let’s all be — not just neighbors, not just colleagues, not just classmates — but intimates. Best friends forever.”
How many best friends can a person have, really?
Personally, I like a little time to pass, and an actual friendship to evolve, before I do any serious hugging.
I’ll admit, though. Sometimes those homey friendship feelings evolve pretty fast. A long afternoon’s conversation on a beach cabin in Michigan, with the Big Lake pounding in the background, thoughts, feelings, worries and hopes exchanged over a glass (but probably two glasses) of chardonnay, and I’m hooked. The connection has been made. I feel the need for a hug when the brand-new friends depart.
What’s a Friend? What’s an Acquaintance?
When it comes to friendship and hugs, I might still be under the influence of the year I spent in Germany as a young woman fresh out of college. The German word for friend — Freund — was used sparingly in Germany.
When I misused it, applying it casually to a classmates or acquaintance (Bekannte), my German friends — yes, they were friends– were quick to set me straight. They took friendship seriously. Once established, they explained, a friendship could last a lifetime.
I realized that, for the Germans I knew, describing an acquaintance as a friend eroded the meaning of the word and the very institution of friendship.
Hugging Post-Coronavirus
Hand shaking is a precarious endeavor these shelter-at-home, pandemic days. So is elbow bumping and giving a high five. Hugging is out of the question, of course. But hopefully we are all locked down with at least one person we can hug. Or could hug, before being cooped up together for the past month.
Once this COVID-19 critter has taken its spiky self off the face of the earth, it will be nice to have the the handshake and the high five back in our social repertoire. As for those fake hugs, might they go the way of the very real virus? I hope so.
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Agreed. And, actually, the common handshake is likely to decrease or go away entirely after COVID-19 as more pandemics are likely to occur in the nearer future.
Yes. I heard Fauci say the other day that he wishes everyone would quit shaking hands. That’s a fine old tradition, imo. But maybe instead we’ll have to take up doing little namaste bows of the head, palms pressed together — which is also a very nice gesture, come to think of it.