What I offer as a professional cuddler is platonic touch, but what platonic means starts to smear when you’re curled up with a stranger in a hotel bed. This is what I realized when I met my first client in Flushing, Queens after an hour’s rattle through the subway. In retrospect, I should have left as soon as he called me “nice and tiny,” but I had come too far in the experiment to turn around then. As we spooned, I gave him permission to caress the skin of my belly, but even that consent was fraught with the politics of payment: because he’d handed over cash, it felt like my job to say yes. I’d naively assumed that right and wrong would be clear to me, but as his hand circled higher and higher, now grazing my bra, now veering back to an innocuous zone as though to escape reprimand, I wondered: how close is too close to my boobs? Where is the line?
I learned about cuddling as a service in 2014 when I was a graduate student strapped for cash, browsing my university’s job boards in search of a summer gig. Someone was opening a business and looking for cuddlers. I ultimately didn’t apply, but its existence burrowed into me, lying latent until I started writing my debut novel, Holding Pattern. That’s when I gave the job to the main character, Kathleen. In the book, a humiliating breakup sends Kathleen reeling back home to live with her mom, and instead of finishing her PhD in cognitive psychology, she explores connection through a Bay Area startup that specializes in touch therapy.
What I learned in my research is that while professional cuddling is far from mainstream, the need it can answer is monumental. The surgeon general calls America’s suffering an “epidemic of loneliness.” Dr. Tiffany Field of the Touch Research Institute warns of “skin hunger”—an unfulfilled need for touch caused by cultural taboos and social stigmas, exacerbated by the pandemic. Yet touch is essential to our health and wellbeing. The first sense to develop in the womb, touch is vital for cognitive and physical development in babies. It lowers your heart rate, blood pressure, and cortisol levels, which lessens stress and boosts immunity. It encourages oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin, which helps you sleep and alleviates pain and anxiety. Contact has measurable social effects: diners tip better if they’re touched by the server, and athletes score more points after they high five. Without it, people literally die sooner.
After I quit my 9-to-5 in late 2021, I started cuddling because I wanted to examine the fine, gossamer boundary between sex and intimacy, pleasure and caretaking, that I’d been thinking about for years. I wanted to embody the confusion, discomfort, and tenderness of holding an utter stranger. Marketing my services, however, proved tricky. For Holding Pattern, I’d invented a network of gig-economy cuddle clinics with modern, millennial aesthethics, but in real life, my options were limited to a handful of websites plagued by Craigslist-era sketchiness. I created a profile on Cuddle Comfort, which seemed to be well trafficked, at least, and set my rate at $80 an hour (I would later bump this up to $100, though some seasoned cuddlers will charge double that). Before long, a user named nynjguy messaged me: “Would love to cuddle ! [sic]”
I never met nynjguy. I would never meet the vast majority of would-be clients, in fact. Our schedules didn’t line up, or they were too far away, or we couldn’t find a suitable space. They were too creepy or got themselves banned while we worked through the logistics. Some of my friends and acquaintances were wary of the exercise, especially the straight men: “What does Ben* think about this?” was the first question one asked, referring to my partner at the time. The truth was that Ben was displeased. He was rightfully concerned about my safety—which I did my best to ensure with proper vetting and location-sharing—but as time went on, I realized that he wasn’t admitting the real rub: that I was offering something that used to belong to him. He didn’t believe that cuddling could be completely platonic for the people who hired me, likening it to the girlfriend experience in sex work. After a while, he asked, “How many people do you have to meet before you have what you’re looking for?”
I couldn’t give him an answer because I didn’t know what I was looking for. Despite the unsavoriness of my first experience, I chafed against the assumption that every client I would meet sought sexual or romantic satisfaction—but I was also keenly aware of the heteronormative dynamics that cuddling enacted and exposed. It’s rare to encounter a male professional cuddler, though they do exist. Of the hundreds of requests I’ve received, only one has been from a woman, and that initial message went nowhere despite cheerful follow-ups from me. The rest have been from self-identified straight men, a demographic that’s especially vulnerable to skin hunger because they’ve been socialized to be homophobic toward other men and sexually aggressive toward women—leaving them suspended in a vacuum of anger, frustration, and loneliness. That didn’t mean they weren’t capable of seeking out platonic intimacy, however. I reached out to a couple other cuddlers using the same site, who corroborated my hunch: their clients—at least in their view—were respectful and genuine.
Over time, experience refined my screening process and gave me the confidence to set firm boundaries, and I had some incredibly fulfilling sessions. I sat on a blanket in Irving Square Park with a client’s head in my lap, tracing the contours of his face and running my fingers along his scalp while an ice cream truck sang at the corner. In bed, I wrapped myself around another client’s lap as though I were a koala, burying my head into his neck. There’s something sweet and disarming about holding a stranger this way. It strips away pretense and bares a simple, animal need, as clarified as thirst or cold. What I’ve learned is that pleasure can be soothing without being carnal. An echo of sexual desire can be a physiological response, as happens to women who get aroused by breastfeeding: it passes, like a cloud, and doesn’t precipitate any action or meaning.
My partner and I eventually broke up, and I spent the winter in California, recuperating. When I returned to New York, the city seemed more hostile, either in comparison to the balmy suburbs or through the lens of a newly single woman. Late one night, trotting home alone through the blank streets of Bushwick, I was tense with fear, alert to everyone I passed. It struck me as unfair that Ben had insinuated I’d had blinders on to danger or desire when, in reality, they shadowed me constantly. I remembered the man who had appeared beside me while I squatted behind a car to pee, working the hard dick in his hand. The man who had stopped me on the way to work by catching me by the hips and suggesting we go somewhere. The man who’d wound his arm back to punch me as I passed on the sidewalk, but hesitated at the last moment while I ducked. I realized that what I’d been looking for through cuddling was a sense of sovereignty and control. I wanted proof that I could be this femme Asian body, vulnerable to another body, and wield that vulnerability to evoke a kind of power, because in that setting, I determined the parameters. I created the arena. I demanded trust, safety, and respect—and if I didn’t get it, I would leave.
In terms of consenting touch, my experiences with cuddling have actually been some of the most communicative. People ask before they place a hand: if it is okay, if I am comfortable. In this way, through gentleness and affirmation, we lead each other to a safe place—it feels strange at first, but soon after natural and necessary—where there is only warm skin and easy breath. It is a place where we can finally relax, where we can drowse in the comfort of needing and having each other.
*Ben is a pseudonym.
Jenny Xie is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree whose debut novel, Holding Pattern, is out from Riverhead Books in June 2023. Her writing on design, travel, and culture has been featured in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Architectural Digest, and Dwell, where she was previously the executive editor.
