How to Detect if Someone’s Hug Is Fake
It is my obligation to alert you that some hugs carry heavy negative emotional baggage. How can you tell?
Ponder for a moment a sincere hug. That’s the kind Grandma gives her grandchildren and long-lost friends share when reunited. Both loving spouses celebrating their anniversary and young people discovering the joy of love express their emotions with a sincere hug.
The “I Really Don’t Enjoy Hugging You” Hug
There is, unfortunately, a counterfeit category of hugs. It is the kind colleagues at industry conventions (who don’t remember each other’s names) annually impose upon each other. It is the obligatory kind people give distant relatives they never knew they had at family reunions. And, of course, the kind you see cutthroat competing employees bestow upon each other at the company Christmas party.
What’s the difference between the first group of hugs and the second? The distance the huggers stand from each other? Sometimes. The tightness of the squeeze? Usually. But here is where the rubber really hits the road in hugging sincerity.
Uncomfortable Huggers Pat Each Other’s Backs!
Say someone throws his arms around you but, a few seconds later, his hands transmogrify into flippers on your back. This indicates he is uncomfortable hugging you for one reason or another, and it mitigates the authenticity of the hug. His hand-flapping discloses discomfort with your closeness.
Do not assume back-patting is always negative, of course. Without knowing the particulars of a relationship, precise analysis is seldom possible. Here are a few situations, however, where people often employ the “Patter’s Hug.”
• Two men: Two gentlemen wish to express friendship, but they want to make it quite clear to each other they are not physically enjoying the hug. How? They thump their hands on each other’s backs.
• Two women: Mutual back-patting by women also expresses discomfort with the closeness, but it doesn’t convey the same fear of misunderstood sexual orientation.
• A man and a woman: Now it gets more complicated.
Four possibilities follow.
1. If the male and female like each other but are not sexually attracted, they immediately begin patting to convey their erotic disinterest.
2. If one of them would like to take the relationship further, but the other wouldn’t, the person who starts patting is signaling lack of sexual attraction, while the disappointed other pats back to show he or she (supposedly) doesn’t care.
3. The two are sexually attracted to each other but feel they shouldn’t be enjoying the hug so much. So they release anxiety through mutual back-patting.
4. When ex-lovers run into each other, they usually start with a sincere hug. When it dawns on them that the relationship is over (or that their new partners are watching), they start patting.
Little Trick #13
Don’t Pat When You Hug
Stay in an embrace as long or as short as the situation and hugging partner warrant. But do not let your hands become flippers on her back lest it subliminally signal that you want to disconnect.
Don’t go crazy analyzing it if your cohugger starts patting your back. It commonly occurs when one of the huggers feels the embrace is lasting too long, signifying, “OK, time’s up. Let’s end this hug thing.” When she starts patting, smile and smoothly curtail the hug.
I hope the foregoing hasn’t stripped the joy of hugging away from huggers, forced hug-haters to grin and bear agonizing embraces, or made you suspicious of everyone who hugs you—or just plain paranoid about hugs. All I mean to say is: be sensitive to the vast difference in people’s reactions to hugs and act accordingly.
Now, I want to give you a safer, one-size-fits-all embracing option. It is a subtle, nonoffensive gesture that clearly says to an acquaintance, “I want to hug you but perhaps it’s not appropriate.”