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When I was seven years old I played little league baseball on a team with two other kids named Rich. Whenever we won a game we did something we invented called “The Richy Hug.”
We would make a little circle with our arms around each other and dance around, bouncing up and down, singing a made-up tune that sounded like a Russian folk song until one of us jumped into the others’ arms. The whole thing was pretty much us doing the “Dance of Joy” from the TV show Perfect Strangers.
It was an extremely silly and not uncommon showing of intimacy between seven-year-old boys. We were still blissfully ignorant of the harmful stereotypes that befall boys as we get older, limiting our expression and forcing us into “acceptable” methods of behavior.
We were still several years away from the arrival of the word “gay” in our consciousness, and it’s subsequent escalation to the most ubiquitous and harmful insult anybody could call a male.
That season was the only one for The Richy Hug. There is something so pure about that giggly, silly, dancing hug that still amazes me. Perhaps because of the physical intimacy, it involved. And most certainly because that intimacy quickly disappears as boys grow up.
Becoming a teenage boy means something inside us gets shut off or shut down. We harden, hold back, and change the ways we might want to behave. We trade expression for repression. Physical contact becomes acceptable only through sport or aggression. And while the spectrum of perceived “acceptable” physical contact between boys is changing, when I was a kid, there was no spectrum.
Physical intimacy was acceptable between athletes. Anything outside of that was gay.
Putting aside for a moment the fact the word gay should never have been an insult to begin with, the line between athlete and homosexual was inaccurate. Not only did it completely ignore even the possibility of a homosexual athlete, but it was constructed from suppositions and insecurities passed down to us from an older generation and readily accepted by everybody. High School excels at shaping and solidifying the worldviews of its students. It broadcasts what is acceptable and what is not. It makes us change our behavior in significant ways.
It’s for this reason, and many others, physical interactions between boys can become so awkward and uncomfortable as they slowly turn into men. We as a culture are terrible about teaching our boys how to physically interact with the world. The lessons we teach are short, specific and early; hard and fast rules leaving boys without the proper tools to interpret appropriate behavior, or even just what they are comfortable with.
We get toddlers to high five. We teach little boys to shake hands like two tiny humans sealing a business deal to buy a swingset. Little boys only seem to shake hands when they get in trouble and are being made to reconcile.
Apologize and shake hands.
We learn the importance of a firm handshake. The eye contact. The grip. But elementary and High School kids don’t generally shake hands in the traditional manner. They develop their own handshakes.
As a kid, a nonchalant hand slap sufficed for hello and goodbye. Other kids developed more elaborate greetings. The physical intimacy was still quite literally at arm’s length. Except of course for athletes.
I remember observing how physical the guys on the football team were allowed to be. The way they hung on each other in the cafeteria or traveled in groups resembling connected pods. You could never call them gay. They wore helmets and tackled each other in the mud. They worked out in a weight room covered in rust. They drank creatine.
Outside of contact sports, boys generally aren’t given the freedom to express physical contact with other boys. They lack an understanding of how to express themselves and thus are underprepared for their interactions with females. And when they do express physicality with females, it can easily become a hyper-sexualized and inappropriate interaction.
When hugging is acceptable only between males and females it inherently sexualizes the act. How can boys know what a platonic hug is if the act is frowned upon with their own gender? How can we expect boys to understand another person’s sexual boundaries if they don’t even understand their personal boundaries of friendship?
Becoming a man for me has, in many ways, felt like being a part of a wildly disorganized experiment. We men invent new methods of interaction that fall somewhere between handshakes and hugs. We are extremely adept at finding new ways to not hug. The fist bump. The bro hug and beyond. We have created a range of non-unanimous options for greeting each other ranging from sterile to incredibly intimate. Too many options really. And it’s awkward.
Watch men. We are awkward creatures.
You can see it on talk shows hosted by men. Observe the differences in how they greet male guests versus female guests. The vulnerability required for physical intimacy between men is something we do not handle well. And I speak of intimacy not in the deeper sense of a close relationship, but merely in the closeness of shared space.
Maybe men feel if they get too close to another man’s face they will accidentally kiss them or be kissed. If their cheeks touch it will say something about them. Again, possibly a fear of a homosexual connotation, but maybe something deeper, more emasculating.
For as physical as boys and men can be, actually sharing that physicality without insecurity is extremely hard for us. Our avoidance of vulnerability makes us shake hands with other men in strange ways. We open our bodies out, lean our heads away as if suspicious. We square our bodies with strength, tilting our heads up pridefully.
In so many ways it feels like interactions between men are careful operations in avoidance. Not getting too close, not being too affectionate, not letting ourselves be perceived as anything other than masculine.
I am not advocating for a specific type of greeting, but merely, for us to honestly and openly acknowledge how we go about greeting each other because it matters. Whether a handshake or a hug, that greeting signals the beginning of an interaction. It is a recognition of arrival, a way of welcoming, of celebrating. It is important.
The way we say hello and goodbye will forever be indicators of our personal comfort and the time we live in. And that means there will always be a greater social context projected onto those interactions. But if we can navigate that with who we are, and not who we are afraid to be, we bring a better self to those interactions.
I was at a bar the other night when I saw a white guy arrive, walk up to his brown friend and go right for the big hug. No awkward handshake, no half bro hug. Just two guys hugging.
It was beautiful.
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