Although it wasn’t always so, for a long time now, people have been broadly willing to accept that sex is one of the legitimate needs of the body. Today it is pretty well understood that not getting enough sex can be a real problem, leading to feelings of stress, disconnection and difficulties with concentration. But there’s another area of physical need that’s not, as yet, fully appreciated. It’s the idea that when you are feeling agitated and anxious, what you might really need is a hug. There’s little opposition to hugs in general, but we’re collectively reluctant to see them as addressing serious emotional requirements.
Hugs are associated primarily with the very young. Up to about the age of four a child may be frequently hugged and held, cradled, patted and carried. We accept that a little person can’t manage everything on their own. There will be times when they need a big person to look after them, support them, keep them safe and fed and comfortable – and calm them down with a hug. Being physically enfolded in a parent’s arms may partially recreate the ultimate stress-free environment: the womb. The young child can’t be helped by explanations and reasons; they respond to touch: gentle warm pressure soothes and relaxes the body and quiets the agitated mind.
However, a hug cannot really be entirely understood just in physical terms. Its power to comfort and console is bound up with the wordless promises it conveys. The true hug is an offer of protection. The arms that embrace the child will defend it against whatever it dreads and will keep it safe in the face of all the dangers that haunt its imagination.
When a hug is most genuine it is also the outward gesture that indicates a readiness to be gentle in terms of understanding the other. The hug implies that one will go slowly and easily, one will not judge negatively, one will be patient in finding out what is genuinely the matter, one will see everything in the kindliest light: sympathy is guaranteed, forgiveness will be available if needed. It is the offer of adult wisdom in the face of immature woes, where the adult will be able to see through the confusion, put things right, teach, assist and solve the problem in a good way. When a parent hugs a child, it is an intimation of an ability to mend broken things. Like a great work of art, a hug is the sensory embodiment of important ideas, an outward sign of inward generosity. And though we might never put any of this into words, it is a source of applied wisdom.
But as the child grows towards adulthood, the assumptions shift dramatically. Independence and self-reliance are central to the ideals of adulthood. We become very wary of any suggestion of needing a wiser, stronger person to look after us. We get prickly around any hint that we might be being patronised or condescended to. One of our most taboo political ideas is paternalism – the admission of a collective desire to be parented, which is taken to be profoundly humiliating.
In this emotional environment, it becomes difficult to take the need for hugs seriously. Hugging can come to seem merely an interesting, elective social style: an expansive alternative to a handshake, which is friendly enough of course but doesn’t express anything like the full vision of kindness that was there in the best hugs of childhood.
But to suggest that someone actually requires a hug is to say something potentially demeaning. It’s suggesting that they are, at least for the moment, rather like a child. They have the same kinds of emotional needs that we come to think of as essentially childlike. To need a really good hug is to admit that one is incapable of coping on one’s own: that one requires protection, guidance, the help of someone wiser and more capable, that one needs to have one’s troubles and anxieties reinterpreted by a more mature mind. It is to say – in shorthand – I am at the moment like a child and I need someone else to be, for a while, like a parent.
Yet even if we don’t usually like to admit it, there are in fact many times when we should be able to revert to a childlike position. There are moments of adult life when one feels petulant, scared, shy and sure that everything suddenly feels totally unfair. One’s ability to look after oneself is terribly depleted. At such times, to get ourselves back together, we need someone else to take the burden from us. We require the equivalent of what the parent does for the child. We are in need of someone to pat at us on the head, to put us to bed early, tuck us in and hold us tight.
It’s tricky to admit how normal and actually reasonable regressive tendencies are; they are an affront to individualism and dignity. They can be cast as pathetic and self-indulgent. It’s awkward to acknowledge that they exist in someone who is 1m 74cms tall and has a day job as a dental hygienist or commercial litigation specialist.
It is – therefore – very helpful to come across profoundly dignified and prestigious cultural objects that take the need for hugs very seriously indeed. In a late work, the Mystical Nativity, Sandro Botticelli (who was a great observer of the parent–child hug) shows some angels hugging adult humans.
Botticelli was hugely sensitive to the way failure and fear are always edging their way into every life – irrespective of how sunny it might look from the outside. The hug is not – for an adult – going to make everything better. But it acknowledges that the strong person will inevitably at times feel like a child and that this should not be met with contempt but with infinite sweetness and warmth.
The periodic need to regress should be seen not as a sign of a failure of maturity but as an aspect of a wise adult acceptance of one’s own deep imperfection and ultimate inadequacy. It can be interpreted as a frank admission that one has taken on too much. Regressing can signal a legitimate need for assistance that has gone unmet for too long, because asking for certain kinds of help has been stigmatised. We live in a competitive environment which makes failure frequent and yet terrifying. We have high expectations and anxieties around body mass index, family life, global security, personal hygiene, never being able to afford to retire, fuel consumption, disposable income, the health risks attached to a food one likes, homeownership, decluttering, child-development milestones, hotel upgrades, KPIs, quarterly targets… Regression doesn’t involve renouncing these concerns. But it may be a very sane pause as one carries the burdens.
In kinder more mature relationships, we’d make allowances for each other’s occasional times of regression. Part of what it is to love another person is to be accommodating and generous to these needs. Ideally, the strange behaviour around regression is itself a sign that someone feels safe enough with you (or you with them) to be pathetic for a time. To love another person isn’t only to admire their strengths and see what’s great about them. It should also involve nursing and protecting them in their less impressive moments. We’ve foolishly excised looking after another person when they are fragile or broken from our vision of love. To ask for a hug is not simply to request a physical embrace. It has a bigger meaning as an admission that one is not coping and as a plea for protection and support. A hug is a symbol of what we are missing in our hypercompetitive individualistic culture: a positive admission of our dependence and fragility.
