After a few hours of conversation in a room at the Super 8 motel in Roseville, Marissa Weiss fell asleep with a man’s arm around her waist.
The man, however, was not her boyfriend. In fact, they had met only hours before. Weiss, 22, was a “professional snuggler.” For $80 an hour, she would cuddle, comfort and caress for a fee.
“There’s no undertone or hidden message,” said the college student from River Falls, Wis., who quit the side gig in January to focus on classes. “It’s just platonic cuddling.”...
“The argument for human touch is particularly poignant in our culture now because we don’t go shake hands and sit with people as often as we used to,” said Chandler Yorkhall, integrative medicine practitioner at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis. “Research bears out that touch is as important as food. Medicine doesn’t have everything we need; we can also benefit from things that touch into our primal human needs, such as touch.”
In Portland, cuddle enthusiasts gathered last Valentine’s Day for CuddleCon, a cuddling convention. National car service Uber is getting in on the snuggle phenomenon, too, by delivering kittens to people in cities, including Minneapolis, for a 15-minute snuggle. And in Virginia, a goat cheese farm was inundated with responses to its request for volunteers to snuggle baby goats.
Cozying up to a furry animal is a no-brainer, but spooning a stranger?
“It totally makes sense to me,” Yorkhall said. “It makes you feel better. It’s a fix in a weird way.” (there is more)
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| A group "cuddle puddle" at Outside Lands, Aug. 9, 2015 |
