(reblog of a post asking: "Are there people who genuinely don’t enjoy cuddling? The fact that people announce being pro-cuddles seems like evidence for it, but I don’t recall seeing any direct claims. Have you?" with a few other rebloggers mentioning that they only enjoy cuddling with a small number of specific people close to them)

I enjoy almost indiscriminate cuddling - like I’d prefer to have at least a 2-3 minute conversation with someone before cuddling them, so they’re not a complete stranger, but that’s pretty much sufficient.

Also, regarding the observation of “The fact that people announce being pro-cuddles seems like evidence for [people not enjoying cuddling]“, to me this observation seems more like evidence for mainstream society having very restrictive views on cuddling (i.e. you should only do it with your significant others or your children, and should rarely do it in public) though perhaps that’s just my super-cuddly self being biased against the idea of many people not enjoying cuddling.

More thoughts: In practice, if a stranger or almost-stranger came up to me and asked to cuddle me in the absence of any sort of context that would make them likely to do so (such as us being at a cuddle party) then I’d be very hesitant to agree to cuddling them. Not because I don’t want to cuddle, per se, but more out of a fear of the unknown - that is, if I’m unable to think of a plausible model of the situation which predicts the other person asking to cuddle me, then their asking me to cuddle means I’m confused and don’t understand the situation, and I tend to avoid situations I don’t understand.

I basically see this as the main reason for pointedly announcing onesself as being pro-cuddles. It lets people know that you’re opting out of the traditional social scripts that limit cuddling to narrow contexts, and, importantly, you know that they know that, so that if someone asks you to cuddle, you’re not like “huh? why are they doing this I’m so confused???” but instead you’re like “oh, they’re doing this because I made a point of announcing that I’m cool with almost-indiscriminate cuddling”.

Pet peeve: when people use “sleep with” as a synonym/euphemism for “have sex with”. Like, THOSE ARE TWO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS STOP TREATING THEM AS BASICALLY-INTERCHANGEABLE FFS.

I think a large part of why I find this so annoying is that I intensely crave sex, but am not so keen on sleeping with people. Like I imagine I am a very unpleasant person to sleep with (even within the set of people who would enjoy sex with me - I take forever to get to sleep, constantly have to shift positions, constantly have to cough, often have to get up to pee), which is bad for me as well, because I’d be constantly fretting over how much I’m probably bothering the other person, which is not exactly conducive to relaxing and getting to sleep.

And I’m sure there are also a lot of people for whom the reverse is true (i.e. they really crave someone they can sleep with non-sexually) and treating “have sex with” and “sleep with” as synonyms makes it needlessly inconvenient for such people (as well as people like me) to communicate their preferences.