- Cuddle parties are intimate gatherings where strangers meet, practice consent, and enjoy human touch.
- There are some hosted in San Francisco, a city with a long track record of bucking social norms and celebrating innovation - in technology, sex, intimacy, or otherwise.
- The events are non-sexual, and while they may not be experiences for everyone, their message of proactive consent and communication can help build healthy relationships, trust, and confidence.
- I decided to go to a cuddle party out of keen curiosity. I found that intimacy takes many forms, but I prefer the kind that exists when established emotional connections, romantic or otherwise, are in place.
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I'm lying with my leg draped over a fellow cuddler, my head resting on the collar of his shirt and his arm wrapped around me with his hand stroking my hair. There's another cuddler, a woman who, like me, had never been to a cuddle party, on his opposite side in the exact same position as me. Her face is inches from mine across from our male companion's chest.
I feel his foot move toward mine. "Is it okay if I run my foot over yours?"
"Yep," I said.
There were about seven clusters of platonic cuddlers in the space. Some were forming "spoon drawers," where multiple people curl around each other in one direction. Some were forming puppy piles. Others laid down with their body nested in another whose body was nested in another and so on, as a chain, in a so-called human train. Consent is the focal point of these cuddle parties, which are explicitly non-sexual. Before you lay a hand on a fellow attendee, you must ask them if it's alright. Around us, murmurs of "Can I put my hand on your shoulder?" "Can I rub your back?" and "Can I touch your face?" could be heard. Soft music, like Bob Marley's "One Love" and John Mayer's "Gravity," played.
I had met the people with whom I was now snuggling about two hours beforehand. And they were there for the same reason that we all were: human touch.