The Beautiful Ways We Reach for One Another

What hugs can teach us about connection, belonging and the quiet power of we

Yesterday was Father’s Day, which for many people may have brought warmth, memory, gratitude, grief, distance, tenderness, or some complicated mixture of all of them. Days like that can make us more aware of the people who have shaped us, the people we miss, the people we love now, and the many ways we reach towards one another across the changing seasons of a life.

Perhaps that is why I have been thinking so much about hugs lately. Not the quick social version where arms briefly meet while our minds are already moving towards the next sentence, but the other kind: the embrace where, for a few moments, both people seem to arrive. Shoulders soften. Conversation can wait. Something in us recognises that we can stop holding ourselves quite so tightly.

Perhaps you can remember one. A hug you did not realise you needed. An airport embrace after months apart. A friend holding you when words would have been inadequate. A child climbing into your arms. Someone you love simply staying there for a little longer.

What happens to us when we genuinely feel held?

Before COVID, I used to organise free-hug events on the Wellington waterfront. Every month or so, a small group of us would gather, usually eight or ten volunteers, and offer hugs to whoever wanted one. Even now, I smile when I remember some of the reactions.

There were people who approached cautiously, with that slightly uncertain expression that said they were still deciding whether embracing a complete stranger was a sensible way to spend the next ten seconds. Then there were the others. They would spot us from further along the waterfront and their whole face would change. Some laughed. Some squealed. Some almost ran into our arms, as if they had unexpectedly discovered a little pocket of joy waiting for them in the middle of an ordinary day.

What began for me as a way of reducing isolation and creating human connection became something I loved for another reason too. I got to watch what happened when people were given permission to reach towards one another. There was no great ceremony to it and no complicated intervention. Two people who might never see each other again simply stopped, opened their arms and shared a few moments of warmth and human contact before continuing with their day. Yet sometimes the person who walked away looked noticeably different from the one who had approached.

We live in a culture that understandably values independence. We teach our children to stand on their own feet, encourage people to become capable and resilient, celebrate individual achievement and speak often about becoming our own person. I value all of that. Yet another truth runs alongside it: human beings have always developed, survived, celebrated, mourned, learned and created in relationship with one another.

We become ourselves in company.

Long before we can speak, we know the experience of being gathered into someone’s arms. A baby settles against a chest. A frightened child reaches upward. Friends throw their arms around one another at an airport. Lovers pull each other closer. A hand rests on the back of someone receiving terrible news. A family embraces after months apart. Bodies have been speaking this language for considerably longer than we have had words to explain it.

Psychologist Dr Sue Johnson, whose work on attachment and Emotionally Focused Therapy transformed our understanding of adult relationships, returned repeatedly to the importance of responsiveness and engagement: being able to reach for someone we love and experience them reaching back.

John and Julie Gottman use different language but describe a remarkably similar movement. Their decades of relationship research pay close attention to the small “bids” people make for connection and what happens when a partner turns towards them. A question, a glance, a joke, a hand extended across a table, the desire to tell somebody what happened today — relationships are continually being built inside these small moments of response.

I love the physicality of those two ideas: reach towards, turn towards. A hug does both.

Why safe touch can feel so powerful

Science has been catching up with some of what human beings have intuitively understood about affectionate touch for generations.

A large 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis brought together 137 studies in its quantitative analysis, involving almost 13,000 people. Across adults and newborns, touch interventions were associated with benefits for both physical and mental health. In adults, some of the stronger findings involved reductions in anxiety, depression and pain, with benefits also seen in measures including cortisol and blood pressure.

Perhaps more interesting for everyday life, increasing the duration of individual touch sessions did not reliably increase the benefit, while frequency appeared to matter more for some outcomes. In other words, there is little reason to turn affection into another performance target where we silently count to a magical number before releasing somebody. (Nature)

A smaller randomised study involving 159 adults found that receiving a twenty-second hug before a laboratory stressor was associated with a lower cortisol response afterwards. The participants did not necessarily report feeling dramatically less stressed, and their heart-rate responses did not significantly differ. That is a useful reminder that our physiology and our conscious interpretation of an experience do not always move in perfect lockstep. (PubMed)

Research following people in everyday life has also found affectionate touch associated with lower momentary anxiety, burden and stress, alongside changes in oxytocin. People experiencing more affectionate touch also tended to report greater happiness and lower cortisol. (PubMed)

None of this means every hug produces the same response. Touch is personal. Culture matters. Relationship matters. Safety matters. A hug is only a gift when it is welcome.

What the research gives us is a richer appreciation of something wonderfully ordinary: safe, affectionate human contact can be part of the way our bodies experience relationship, safety and stress. Perhaps that is why some hugs feel so different from others.

We all know the quick social version. Arms make brief contact while our minds are already moving towards the next sentence. Then there are the embraces in which both people seem to arrive. The body softens, the conversation can wait, and for a few seconds we become fully aware of the person standing in our arms. That kind of hug feels less like a greeting and more like presence.

What happens when we let the other person let go first

We have a rule in our family that I have always loved.

When I hug my children, they let go first.

I do not decide how long they need the hug. They do. If it is brief, it is brief. If they remain there, my arms remain around them. There is no clock running in my head and no point at which I decide that surely this has been long enough. The person inside my arms gets to decide when they are ready to step away.

The rule has become more poignant to me as my children have grown into adults, because one of the great paradoxes of loving children is that we spend years holding them close while preparing them to leave us.

Their worlds grow. They become independent. They make decisions we no longer make for them. Their work, friendships, relationships, adventures and homes begin to stretch beyond the orbit of the family life in which they were raised. One day, the little person whose whole body once fitted against yours is standing in front of you as a grown human being with a life you can witness and love, yet never own.

And still, when they come into my arms, they let go first.

There is something very tender in that for me. I cannot hold my children inside childhood, and I would never want to. Love wants them to grow into the fullest expression of themselves, to travel, explore, create, love and build lives that belong completely to them. Yet when we meet again and their arms come around me, I can offer this one small thing: I will stay here until you have had enough.

Sometimes love is simply being willing to hold on until the other person is ready to let go.

Perhaps that is why the rule means so much to me. It is really about more than hugging. It says: Your timing matters to me. Your experience matters to me. You can stay in this moment for as long as you need.

And somewhere inside that is one of the deepest things I think we can communicate to another human being: I see you. I care about you. I am here.

The changing shape of belonging

There are so many seasons in a human life, and each one gently rearranges the shape of our belonging.

Children leave home. Parents grow older. Friends move away. Relationships begin and sometimes end. A person changes jobs and suddenly discovers how much belonging had been woven into familiar faces, morning conversations and shared laughter. Families scatter across cities and countries until love sometimes requires airports, passports and a considerable amount of planning.

At the same time, life keeps adding people too. A new friend appears. A baby is born. Someone falls in love. A neighbour becomes important. A colleague becomes the person you ring when things go sideways. Old friendships deepen. A birthday brings generations around one table and, for an evening, everyone is in the same room again.

There is tenderness in recognising that the people we love will never again be standing in precisely the configuration they are standing in today. Perhaps that is one of the quiet invitations of ageing: to become more awake to the people who are here while they are here.

Our elders belong in this conversation too. Parents, grandparents, older relatives and friends remain people who can enjoy the warmth of an arm around their shoulder, a hand held a little longer, an affectionate kiss or a welcome embrace. Our need to feel seen does not expire because another birthday arrives.

And touch belongs to joy just as much as it belongs to comfort. We hug at weddings and airport arrivals. We wrap ourselves around the person who has just received wonderful news. We lift children into the air. Sports teams pile into one another after a win. Friends squeal and embrace in the street. Happiness seems to have an instinct to travel outward.

Joy wants company.

Why connection matters beyond the hug

This is where the subject of hugging opens into something larger for me.

What if part of our wellbeing comes from remembering that our lives were never meant to be entirely self-contained?

Healthy relationship does not require us to disappear into other people. Quite the opposite. A strong we has room for two whole Is. We can have boundaries, individuality, independence, private dreams and our own inner life while still recognising that relationship, affection, community and belonging enlarge our experience of being alive.

We are better together in many of the ways that matter most. We learn from one another, lend courage to one another, restore perspective and laugh harder when laughter is shared. We carry people through periods when their own strength feels thin. We create families, friendships, teams and communities whose possibilities could never have emerged from one person acting alone.

My work with HeartMath has given me another language for thinking about this. HeartMath explores relationships between emotional state, heart-rate variability, physiological coherence and self-regulation, including how appreciation and care relate to patterns associated with greater physiological coherence.

Yet there is an even simpler observation available to any of us: people affect people.

Someone enters a room tense and others feel it. A calm person can steady a conversation. A baby responds to the body holding it. One person starts laughing and somebody else joins in. A frightened friend settles as another person sits beside them. We are continually responding to voice, face, posture, attention, affection and presence.

Perhaps a hug is one particularly beautiful way of saying, for these few moments, we are here together.

I think of birds when I consider this. A single bird can fly, yet birds also flock. One begins calling in the morning and somewhere nearby another answers, and then another, until what began as one sound becomes the living soundscape we call birdsong. Each bird remains itself. Connection has not erased individuality; it has created something larger around it.

Human beings have our own versions of this. We gather around tables. We sing. We dance. We cook for people. We tell stories. We show up at funerals and birthdays. We hold babies. We sit beside hospital beds. We stand at arrival gates scanning the crowd for a familiar face.

And sometimes, long before we have found the words we want to say, our arms are already opening.

Who do you see?

So I wonder what happens if you look into the circle of your own life now.

Who do you see?

Perhaps it is your child — five years old or fifty. Perhaps it is your mother, father or grandparent. Your partner. Your sibling. The friend whose life has changed recently. The person who appears strong enough that everybody assumes they are fine. The colleague who has quietly had a difficult year. Someone you have not seen for far too long. Or perhaps somebody whose life is going beautifully and whose happiness you simply want to celebrate.

Maybe one face came to you before you even finished reading that paragraph.

The next time you see them, if affection is welcome between you, allow the hug to become a real moment. Turn towards them. Let your attention arrive where your body already is. Feel the person in your arms. Give the embrace enough room to be experienced rather than simply completed.

And perhaps, once in a while, let them let go first.

See what happens.

Because the most meaningful invitation here may be larger than hugging more often. It may be to become more aware of all the ways we reach for one another — and all the opportunities we have to answer when somebody reaches for us.

A hug, a hand, a conversation, a shared meal, a song, a dance, an afternoon spent together, a message that says I was thinking about you, a visit to somebody whose world has become quieter. These are small acts when measured against the enormous scale of a human life, yet perhaps a human life is largely made from exactly these kinds of moments.

We remember ourselves through relationship. We remember that strength and tenderness can live in the same body, and that independence and belonging can grow side by side.

And every now and then, in the simple act of putting our arms around another human being and staying for as long as the moment asks of us, we remember the beautiful intelligence of the we.

If someone came to mind while you were reading this, perhaps that is your invitation. Send them this piece if you would like to share the thought, or send them a message. Make the call. Arrange the coffee.

And when you see them, open your arms.