I'm likewise introverted, and when I'm especially upset or have been surprised I don't even want my husband to touch me. I especially don't want strangers touching me, and I don't accommodate drunken bar persons who want to hug me because fuck that. If you don't want to be touched, no one should be touching you.

These attitudes are not ubiquitous across cultures at all. I find your original attitude that there's some sort of damage to not wanting to touch people to be sad and sort of dehumanising (we're people with free will not mammals in an experiment - gtfo with this evo psych rubbish) but the idea that everyone in the…

"He said it sounded like a very sad way to be, but he seemed to understand."

Generally cultures that involve a lot of physical touching, involve that much touch with both adults and children. Children are generally more comfortable hugging after seeing their parents go through the same ritual.

A little boy refusing to hug anyone except those specific people he picks wouldn't raise any negative comments. A little girl doing the exact same thing - selecting those she wants to show affection to, and refusing to let anyone she doesn't choose touch her - quickly draws comments of "but won't she be socially…

I was shamed into hugging older relatives who I didn't want to hug. I was very shy. I was expected to sit on their laps, hug them, submit to patting and chin-chucking, and whatever they wanted. I found this incredibly uncomfortable. My parents would lamely say, "Oh she's shy,' but they said it with such intense…

This comment is the epitome of logic. Thank you!

By saying grandmother's exist to huge their grandchildren you are expressly implying that grandchildren exist for their grandmothers. That's not true. People and children exist for their own reasons, they are not large stuffed animals.

I am from an Arab family and I wish I had been raised this way. In our culture, touch is very important and also very scrutinized. We greet one another with anywhere between four and a million kisses on the cheek, but non-familial touching between the genders is heavily policed after a certain age. It simultaneously…

One more thing that makes my dad awesome was his telling us while we were growing up "You do not have to hug, kiss or let anyone pick you up you do not want to. If they insist or get mad tell them "My daddy and mommy said I don't have too and please talk to him" ." An uncle got angry and said we were weird for not…

My Italian family's gushy grabbiness is one of the reasons WHY I don't like gratuitous touching today. "As soon as I'm a grownup I won't have to put up with this shit anymore," I would mutter to myself, and as soon as I became a grownup I kept that promise. Being touched when you don't want to be touched doesn't do a…

Yes, but learning from the get-go that you show physical affection on your own terms based on how you feel about the relationship in that moment sounds a lot healthier than offering physical affection out of obligation based on a title one holds in the relationship, doesn't it?

But this child isn't being denied touch. She's being given the right to say that, at that particular moment, she doesn't want to be touched.

I come from an ethnic family, with lots of enforced touching, lots of enforced kissing of older people, lots of enforced kisses, and that's why I didn't object when my neighbor, and, on a separate occasion, his son,put their hands all over my private areas before I was even five. All because I was taught I'm supposed…

Not at all related to children, but I recently got a dog, and I've had several not so pleasant interactions when people reach down to pet my dog without asking. She's only a year old and has had barely any training (she's a rescue), and she's about 40 pounds and jumps on people when she's excited. She loves people so…

Her daughter isn't avoiding touch. Her daughter is touching on her terms. That sounds healthy to me.

I love this, and that you're doing this for your daughter. The idea that little kids aren't people who have just as much right to refuse physical affection as anyone else is kind of mind-boggling to me. Can you imagine someone telling you as a full grown adult "Hug this person that you just met!" Ick.

Ah, what a lovely society we live in where not touching people you don't want to touch makes you socially inept. No rape culture here people, nothing to see here.

Why does my employer get to be the ant-fraud brigade, why not the insurance company? How does worry about fraud (and I don't see how that even makes sense, considering the birth control mandate) allow my employer access to my medical records?

You could use mine- I need a hormonal IUD to take care of my evil periods from hell but I cannot have high dosages of hormones because it causes blood clots. My IUD is the lowest dosage of hormonal BC out there. HUZZAH!