Everyone loves hugs. That’s a fact. If you think you don’t love hugs, you’re wrong. You probably just don’t like hugs from strangers or something. Or people around you just don’t know how to give good, proper hugs.

I saw the perfect hug outside of Butler 209 the other day. It made me feel happy for a straight week afterwards from just witnessing it, it was that good of a hug. A girl who was slightly taller than me (she looked to be about 5’6″) and a guy who was a full head taller than her were hugging each other, and the guy was leaning into her, putting his entire body weight on her. Their arms were tightly wrapped around each other: a real intimate hug, not a formality hug. The serene, happy expression on his face gave me the feeling I get when I eat a big bowl of really good pasta. Although I had hundreds of pages of reading to do, and it was fairly late at night in Butler, I was perfectly joyous from just looking at that goddamn hug and I couldn’t stop smiling like a fool! Now imagine; if that hug had that kind of effect on me, a mere bystander, no more than a longing witness, how happy would the actual participants have been?

I think the most important factor that constitutes a good hug is sincerity, which manifests itself as the tightness of the hug. You can’t give tight hugs when you’re hugging someone out of formality; that’s weird because of the intimacy. The best hugs I’ve gotten were all tight, intimate hugs. Of course, everything is best in moderation, because hugs that are too tight are suffocating and annoying. You should be holding the person you’re hugging tightly to you, but you shouldn’t be exerting your arms or straining to squeeze the person. It sounds complicated, but it’s easy in real life; you just know when a hug is right.

Sometimes, when one person is shorter than the other, it’s a good idea for the shorter person to wrap their arms around the neck of the taller person. It makes for better balance, and it increases intimacy, making the hug a more genuine one. Especially if these two people are trying to kiss, this is the most ideal way to hug someone. This position helps to support the neck of the shorter person who must bend their neck upwards to meet the mouth of the taller one because the arms and shoulders are lifted, so it is naturally easier to lift the neck and head.

I will now give some examples of very good hugs I’ve experienced to further concretize these concepts. I have two friends who always give me very good hugs; both are taller than I (which is unsurprising because I’m 5’4″), which should be noted. Something else to note is that I’m always very happy to see both these friends, so my hugs are always genuine. I will describe a very specific scenario for easier understanding: when I am standing at the top of the stairs past Lerner that lead to Carman, and I see my friend at the bottom of the stairs, I can leap down the stairs hard enough to be forceful but gently enough that I don’t knock him over, and throw my arms around his neck. He would then hold me under my arms by my ribcage and give me a few spins. This is a very good hug for three reasons:

1. If I’m happy enough to see the friend that I jump down the stairs to hug him, the proceeding hug is obviously a very genuine one.
2. If he is able to lift me up and spin my entire body around, the hug is necessarily a tight, cozy one.
3. The jump and spins add some theatrics to the hug, which adds fun to intimacy.

Usually, though, when I hug these two friends, it’s a simplified version of this, because the hug that I described above requires a certain terrain (i.e. a small flight of stairs of between 3 to 6 steps) to work. I might just jump at them and throw my arms around their necks, or simply give a nice, tight hug. No dead fish arms from me. I know better than that.

These A+ hugs are fortunately routine for me, but they’re completely platonic and friendly. However, I recently got a non-platonic A+ hug from a guy I’d spent the night with. There’s nothing much to say about the night, because it was a generic one-night stand; I met him at a party, went back to his apartment, spent the night, and left in the morning. The good-bye hug that he gave me, however, was quite special and memorable. He was wearing a backpack, but still managed to give me a good, non-awkward hug, which requires a high level of skill from both parties. It was a nice, tight hug, and after pulling me in, he smoothly and naturally kissed the top of my head quickly, gently, and affectionately, being more than a full head taller than I am. It wasn’t a generic, rather awkward post-one-night-stand-good-bye-forever hug; it said to me, text me later, maybe.