Love and Hugs

First, ten things I love, in no particular order.

1. Redwood trees
2. Kozy Shack chocolate pudding
3. That perfect novel with action, romance, and depth
4. Something that’s none of your business
5. The smell of lilacs
6. The smell of rain on dirt
7. Cool accents
8. Bach
9. Okay, I have a secret. The real reason I wrote this post was not to talk about love and hugs, but to see how many of my Facebook friends would click the link to a post called Love and Hugs. My husband and I were discussing the fact that my two most-read titles so far are about the ‘F’ word and steroids. He suggested testing out the title Love and Hugs. So, if you are reading this, congratulations! You are either one of my more refined readers or one of my more loyal friends.

(Standing ‘O’ for you.)

I guess I’d better come up with something interesting for those of you who actually clicked the link hoping to hear some wit and/or wisdom about love and hugs. I’ll try to make it funny, since my blog theme is supposed to be humor.

Have you read the book The Five Love Languages? You should. Other than the fact that there’s only about 30 pages worth of useful information and 100 pages of filler about how using the concepts in The Five Love Languages has brought couples back from the brink of divorce, it’s a great book. The gist of it is that if you’re not speaking someone else’s love language, they might not feel loved. You could be scraping the poop off their shoes and telling them they are the wittiest, most attractive person you know, but if their love language is not acts of service or words of affirmation, but gifts, they might not know you love them. Wouldn’t it be nice to know before you scrub someone’s toilet that they’d really rather you bring them some fake tattoos from the quarter machines in front of the grocery store?

I digress. Whether it has anything to do with the book The Five Love Languages and its language of physical touch or not, my pastor has decided that if someone comes up to talk to him at church, “somebody’s gettin’ hugged.” I would like to be more like him, but I keep remembering a certain young man who maybe had some sensory issues. I put my hand on his arm as I said, “Hi!”

And he said, “Don’t touch me.”

He was always very pleasant to me after that, but I still feel weird going around hugging people. It’s not my natural inclination in the first place. (My top love language is words of affirmation.) But if we could have some sort of worldwide signal that we like hugs, I would appreciate it. How about a purple band around our left arm? Or a little wink when we said hello? No, we might feel pressured to wink when someone else winked, and then someone we hadn’t winked at would feel slighted when we winked at the next person due to peer pressure. So maybe it’s back to arm bands.

But there are some creepy guys out there. Sorry, guys, but I can see women frantically trying to rip their arm bands off before a certain guy sees them. Maybe there should be different color bands for same-gender hugs only. Okay, so purple for “Everybody Hug Me,” and green for “Same Gender Hugs.” Just to be safe, I think I’ll wear a green band.*

Well, I hope you’ve liked my ramblings about love and hugs. Be sure to click “like” if you came here from Facebook, so I know who my most refined and loyal readers are.

Love and hugs,
Marie

* With a purple band in my purse in case I ever run into Buster Posey. (Google Buster hugs.)