Against Hugging. (Sort of.)
March 2016.
The pitch meeting seems to have gone well. I can’t really tell, as it is my first time pitching a TV series. A year earlier, I came up with an idea for a one-hour drama based on my experiences in the Kabbalah Centre; what started as idle musing turned into a treatment, the purchase of screenwriting software, options, and agents. Now we are meeting with one of the most powerful television production companies in town. It all happened very fast.
My team and I have submitted our pilot in a huge conference room in a Burbank high-rise; from where I sit on a much-too-soft couch, I can look out the huge window and see the glories of Glendale, Eagle Rock, and Mt. Washington. Jerry, the development exec to whom we have pitched our series, rises from his seat. He wears enormous, chic, scarlet-framed glasses which magnify watery blue eyes.
“We’ll give it a good read and discuss,” he says, “But I just love what you’ve come up with. What a compelling premise! What fabulous characters! I have such a good feeling about this!”
Los Angeles is the city where, as William Goldman observed, you starve to death on encouragement. I’ve lived here long enough to know that effusiveness is a guarantee of absolutely nothing. I rise too, as does my team. As the lead writer, I step forward first, offering my hand.
Jerry waves his arms in mock distress. “Oh no no, we don’t do that here,” he cries. “Come in, come in!” He opens his arms wide, this man perhaps my age and nearly a foot shorter, and I am pulled into a very brief but very energetic embrace. My agent, co-writer, and producer each take turns being clutched by Jerry, and then we are ushered out.
In the elevator, the agent says what we are all thinking. “I’m afraid he’s going to pass.”
I have the same intuition, but I can’t resist the joke. “But he hugged me so hard!” I declare with mock innocence and am rewarded with small grim laughs from my equally disappointed colleagues.
We will never sell the screenplay, and I will leave behind my brief and misjudged sojourn into trying to write for television, but I have not forgotten the only pitch meeting of my career. I had more or less forgotten Jerry’s embrace – full of warmth, signifying nothing – until I read this Fatherly piece by my friend John DeVore: Can’t We All Just Hug Each Other? John begins his piece by recounting a recent awkward greeting with an old friend:
As we approached each other outside the diner, I extended my hand for him to shake while he opened his arms for an embrace. There was an awkward pause before we quickly changed tactics: he reached for my hand, and I leaned in for a hug. We laughed nervously and settled on a fist bump, the weakest form of greeting between men our society allows. It’s been bugging me ever since.
The reasons dudes do what dudes do are sometimes lost to legend. But the answers are always simple. I didn't hug him at first because I was momentarily transfixed by a parade of insecurities.
I have had the same sort of encounter many times. For me, the awkwardness does not lie in the fear of hugging another man, or the fear of having a hug rejected. It lies in not knowing what the other person prefers or expects. Jerry the entertainment executive handled the uncertainty by making hugs compulsory. His “We don’t do that here” in response to my attempt at a handshake was both a gesture of power and an indulgent display of faux intimacy. Anyone who has spent time in the entertainment industry knows full well that hugs, no matter how exuberant, are almost always mere ritual.
The subtext of the Hollywood hug is “We’re not stodgy and uptight! We’re fabulous and warm and on a first-name basis with everyone! Formality is not how we roll, baby!” It has all the sincerity of the air kiss, or the deadly lie of “Let’s do lunch!”
I like to hug, but I prefer to hug people (of either sex) whom I already know very well. I also like to shake hands. (I am too old for fist bumps, and for a man my age to fist bump screams “Trying too hard.” What’s next, starting a TikTok?) Where I break with my friend John is that I am keenly aware that just as a bear hug can be dismissive and perfunctory, a handshake can be charged with meaning and profound emotion.
I grew up in the sort of family that believed that manners were more important than grades or athletic prowess. (Sports and books were worthy passions, but learning how to navigate other human beings was the primary task). One summer, when I was about eight, I had handshake lessons. My older male cousins, at my grandmother's behest, spent hours teaching me the "perfect grip," so that I would never be either a "dead fish" or an "insecure brute." Grandmother explained that you couldn't trust a man who wouldn't give your hand a firm squeeze, but if he shook your hand too vigorously or crushed your bones or pumped too long, he was being “vulgar” and the aforementioned “trying too hard.” (A gentleman lives in fear of being accused of either grave failing.)
The firm handshakes had to come with eye contact and with an enthusiastic greeting. "How do you do, I'm Hugo Schwyzer" - that phrase has echoed in my life since I was a boy. Endless repetitions on the front porch of my grandmother's house at the ranch, so that I could match that introductory phrase to the eye contact and the cheerful proffering of my right hand.
(We were taught that a gentleman never offers his hand to a woman first. You will embarrass her if she doesn't wish to touch you, and you should never presume she wants to touch you. Simply approach, say your introductory phrase, and beam at her. If she offers a hand, shake it; if she doesn't, that's fine too. This was good training for when I spent a few years living among Orthodox Jews, where men and women never shake hands.)
One aunt suggested that I ought to have a "warm twinkle" in my eye when I said hello. I practiced twinkling in the mirror. I couldn't manufacture it -- what muscle deployed it? So, I imagined my eyes twinkling with a calm pleasure at meeting someone new. I kept on trying to summon a mysterious twinkle, a distant star somewhere behind my iris, and one day during handshake lessons, a cousin declared that he had seen it. I was terribly proud.
Of course, if you have a warm twinkle for everyone and apply just the right pressure with your fingers and palm every time you shake a hand, then what you are doing is certainly no more individualized than standard Hollywood embraces. Greetings are doorways to closeness and intimacy – and business, but they are not, of themselves, those things. I can show you I am fond of you without holding you in my arms until you relax into my hug. If I can’t, that’s a failing of my vocabulary and my manners.
When I was a church group youth leader, I hugged the kids who wanted to be hugged. It turned out that a lot of teenagers of both sexes really wanted to be held by a safe father figure. I was happy to do it. I was also careful to let the kids initiate the hugs, not merely out of a sense of propriety or fear for my reputation, but out of a deep desire to ensure that they never felt physical touch was compulsory. I can remember having close relationships with a couple of young people who did not want to be hugged but did want to be heard and be acknowledged. It was important to send the message that while physical embraces are one way to display affection and concern, they are not the only way. No child should be compelled to allow someone to press their torso against theirs as the admission price to acceptance.
In May 1999, I met with my doctoral adviser, Professor Waugh, in his office at UCLA. I had passed my exams and finished my thesis. The final hurdle was to have the committee members sign the completed dissertation. I asked the other committee members for their signatures first, and then brought the manuscript to Professor Waugh’s office. We sat and chatted for a while. He allowed me to admit that I thought I’d never finish, and then he surprised me by saying I would be his last doctoral candidate. He was moving up into administration and would have no time to advise graduate students who shared his passion for medieval England. As I took in that news, Professor Waugh signed my dissertation, pushed it back across the desk to me, rose, and extended his hand.
“Let me be the first,” he said: “Congratulations, Dr. Schwyzer.” The handshake that followed was more meaningful than most of the hugs of my life. It will be 25 years this spring, and I still tingle at the memory.
Should men hug more? I suppose the simple answer is, sure, if they want to. Is hugging other men gay? John DeVore notes that many men, particular those over forty, still fear that embracing signals desire or weakness. I’m with John in wishing for that unhappy stereotype to vanish. But just as a hug between two men does not evince either weakness or desire, it also is not proof that their bond is somehow stronger and more devoted than if they merely shook hands. As people who live in bodies, we will always want to use our bodies to show respect, or longing, or affection, or gratitude, or merely to signal the beginning and end of meetings. How we use our bodies to show these things is conditioned by culture and personality. There is no right way — but the wrong way is always the way that makes the other person feel uncomfortable.
“We don’t do that here,” said Jerry the development executive as he refused my hand and folded me into his arms. In his mind, the fact that he hugged the people whose work he intended to reject somehow made the rejection less painful – at least for him. He could tell himself that he wasn’t just another corporate officer, but instead a groovy creator who just wanted to exchange positive vibes and energy with other groovy creators. (I am sympathetic to self-deception, I suppose, so I don’t judge the Jerrys of the world harshly.)
The gesture that will best convey caring is the gesture that is welcome. Sometimes that’s a hug. Sometimes, it’s a handshake. I know that for me, I prefer to deploy hugs as outward and tactile signs of a long-established closeness. (The hug doesn’t create the closeness – the hug symbolizes the closeness you already built with time and words.) Everyone else gets sincere handshakes and head nods and grins.
If I know that someone will be put off by my refusal to hug, I will happily put my arms around them, not as a show of intimacy or emotion but out of a desire to not be rude. A gentleman is always flexible. A gentleman never says, “We don’t do that here,” whatever is on offer. But a gentleman has his preferences, and mine is for hugs to be reserved for a select few with whom I have an enduring history.