Cuddle Party

The Humbling

I couldn’t get anyone to go with me. As a writer about pleasure, I felt compelled to experience Cuddle Party, but my husband of 25 years said the thing sounded weird, and my most daring friend just wrinkled her nose. So I bought a single ticket on EventBrite, as if Cuddle Party was just another conventional entertainment, like a concert or a play.

According to the Cuddle Party website, a cuddle party is a “social event where participants engage in consensual, non-sexual touch and affectionate physical contact.” Those bland words set my senses aglow. For $69 (oddly enough), I would be cuddling with strangers in a NYC loft!

I’m fairly old, but I’m very fit, and I think I’m quite cute. After all, my husband says I’m the most beautiful woman in the world. So I assumed I was cuddle-worthy. I do like a good cuddle, but I’ve only cuddled people I know well: boyfriends, husbands, and my sons when they were children. Now I nuzzle my little granddaughters, but only briefly, because unless they’re sleepy they don’t stay still for long.

I’ve rarely felt the urge to cuddle a friend, but I now wondered: What would it feel like to cuddle a woman? What about two women? Possibilities expanded. How about cuddling two men and a woman at once?

Cuddling is defined as hugging, embracing, nestling, stroking. It’s not sexual, although it can easily become so . . . but not at Cuddle Party! (For some reason, no articles such as “the” or “a” are used with “Cuddle Party”: Just as you might “go to work,” you “go to Cuddle Party.”)

The website is clear: THIS EVENT IS NON-SEXUAL, DRUG AND ALCOHOL FREE, AND LIMITED TO PARTICIPANTS WHO ARE 18+. 11 rules are posted, the most significant being:

You don’t have to cuddle anyone at Cuddle Party, ever.

You must ask permission and receive a verbal YES before you touch anyone. (Be as specific in your request as you can.)

Before we’d get to cuddle, there would be a one-hour workshop on consent. I wondered why such a simple concept warranted an entire hour, fretting that this would give us less time for the main activity.

The website advises: “Bring comfy pajamas to change into.” (One rule states “Pajamas stay on the whole time.”) I would have liked to bring my best pajamas, teal blue trimmed with white rickrack, but they were short, possibly immodest, and my arms and legs might be cold, so I packed a warmer pair (a wise choice, it turned out, because the venue was chilly). This clothing (cotton jersey, not silk or lace, and decidedly not lingerie) aligned with an image on their website of three people in an affectionate pile, two men and a woman: my favorite (as yet theoretical) combination.

All about half my age.

If I am often conscious of my age (and of my attempts to defy it), I would be especially aware of it at Cuddle Party.

Cuddle Party (“a warm evening of connection, cuddles and consent”) was created by Reid Mihalko and Marcia Baczynski (“Marcia B”), who wanted people to have the opportunity to explore non-sexual touch and physical affection in a safe space. This seems very “California,” and related to the current polyamory trend, but in fact, the two began hosting workshops and events 20 years ago in New York City. The concept has spread globally: according to Marcia B’s website, there are now 200 cuddle party facilitators on five continents.

Cuddle Party in New York is now run by the Tantra Institute, and the founders are no longer involved. Marcia B runs workshops on getting what you want, and Mihalko also gives workshops, among them Blowjob Grad School . . . for when cuddles aren’t enough.

In the days before the event, I kept daydreaming about Cuddle Party, imagining a sensual paradise, a radiant garden where attractive and open-minded people playfully intertwined. One person would stroke my hair. I would caress somebody’s shoulder. Somebody else would be pressed against my back, spooning me. My new friends and I would be touching right up to the sexual line (the collar bone but not the breast), and our very restraint would be erotically charged. All would be guileless and guiltless. Pleasure in public with strangers! An extended sensuous carnival! What joy lay ahead!

At the last minute, as I was packing my pajamas, my husband said, “Maybe I’ll come with you, after all,” but by then the event was sold out. So I went solo, just as I’d gone solo to Burning Man 15 years earlier (and what a time that had been!).

Cuddle Party keeps a low profile. There’s no listing in the lobby, and, indeed, the address, somewhere in the financial district, isn’t provided until shortly before the event. I walked across the lobby. There was someone in the elevator, pressing the button for the Cuddle Party floor. If it’s usually awkward to be sharing a small elevator with a stranger (you may nod in greeting, but you basically wall yourself off), it’s twice as awkward when you are both going to Cuddle Party, where you might soon be touching. As we ascended, the young man and I avoided looking at each other.

The elevator door opened directly onto a loft. The foyer area was small and crowded, with many people in line for the single bathroom. A woman with a clipboard signed me in, and then I proceeded to the big room, where about thirty people were lolling about on couches and futons and pillows. I went into a screened-off cubicle, changed into my pjs, and joined the others.

Perhaps because the counterculture of my youth was so white, I was surprised and pleased to find that the group was racially diverse. About a third was Black, and there were many Asians. Most people were in their thirties or forties, though I did see a few in their twenties and two or three people of my generation. One woman was there with her daughter of about forty-five.

The facilitator, with his balding head and graying beard, also appeared to be around my age, which put me at ease. I chatted with him as more people arrived and we waited for the program to start. He was genial, enthusiastic and kind. He’d been doing this work for years, and he told me his father is a Cuddle Party facilitator as well.

I made a quick calculation. His father must be at least ninety—how great that he was still working! I asked, “How old is your dad?”

He said “Seventy-three.”

In other words, the facilitator whom I thought was my age was probably in his forties! How could I be so far off?

Perhaps I was this far off about many things.

I plopped down on a pillow on the floor beside a Black couple, a husband and wife who’d been to Cuddle Party before. At this point, I didn’t dare guess their age, but they had to be decades younger than I.

I looked around the room. I tried to decide about these folks, because my friends would surely ask: were they hot or not? The couple closest to me was very attractive, and I’d heard that black skin was extremely soft. But most of the people in the room were of average appearance. There were a few people most would happily pursue and a few most would not, and about twenty people in the middle. There seemed to be an equal number of women and men, a few of them probably gay.

Although the website emphasized strict punctuality, with the doors supposedly locked at 7 pm, we waited half an hour for the latecomers to straggle in.

During this time, I couldn’t help noticing the general grubbiness of the place. I wish they had hired a cleaning service or rented a higher-end loft. More disturbing was the huge window on the south wall of the loft. It had no blinds or drapes, so people on the upper floors of the building across the street could look right in. Anybody with a tripod could photograph any of us recognizably.

Finally, the welcome circle was formed, and the workshop began. We were told how to ask for and refuse consent. We did exercises where we asked for what touch we wanted and were turned down, and we did exercises where we turned down all requests. This seemed silly at first, but the exercises achieved the goal of making us comfortable both requesting and turning down cuddles—and also getting refused. They helped us verbalize our requests and responses frankly, without fear, and this could affect us well beyond cuddles. What seemed like a dreary preamble to the evening was providing us with a useful skill.

Of course, there was the usual workshop jargon. We were in a safe space. The room was our container. We should respect people’s boundaries. We should practice mindfulness.

(And I should practice being non-judgmental!)

Finally, the workshop was over, and, as the website advised, we’d have “a couple of hours for free-style cuddle time – to relax, chat, cuddle, have a snack, or just hang out.”

I didn’t want to have a snack or just hang out, and I looked longingly at the married couple who had been nearby. But they had scooted away and were facing another direction. Was I paranoid or had they taken evasive action? I looked elsewhere. No one was looking at me or waving me over, but the exercises had emboldened me.

I asked the person closest to me, a tall fellow of about 35, “Could I stroke your forearm?” He gave his consent, so I stroked his forearm. It wasn’t especially pleasurable, and it didn’t lead to further touch. After a while, I said thank you and moved on. I asked to caress a woman’s cheek, and she let me.

My few requests were never denied, but I was never asked for touch myself.

After about half an hour, to misquote Nora Ephron, I began to feel like a Wallflower at the Non-Orgy.

In fact, many people were not cuddling, merely chatting awkwardly with each other. The absence of alcohol or, for me, weed, meant it was harder to be sociable, especially here, when things could go so far so fast. I thought of Dorothy Parker’s poem, “Reflections on Ice-Breaking”:

Candy is dandy

But liquor is quicker

If I couldn’t smoke a joint, I would have loved a glass of wine.

Perhaps newbies to Cuddle Party are often inhibited. I ended up on a banquette with another first-timer, a German woman of my generation. We spoke about ourselves. I told her I was happily married.

She said she was looking for a partner and showed me her “dating cards,” which she would proactively give to men who interested her, a gambit I admired. The cards contained only her first name and her phone number. She didn’t want prospective dates doing internet research on her (I wish I’d asked why!), and she didn’t want emails. She wanted calls, she wanted voices, she wanted true connection. She had come to Cuddle Party for some touch, yet like perhaps half the people in the room, she wasn’t cuddling, she was talking.

Maybe the two of us could have cuddled, but at the time it didn’t occur to me. I moved toward the crackers and cheese.

I did see some cuddling going on, principally a few people on the rug hugging a pretty woman of about thirty, but I was never part of such a poly pile. I saw no people I wanted to embrace, and no one seemed eager to embrace me. My warmly envisioned garden was drying out and withering.

Or maybe only I was.

Is any experience as thrilling as one’s fondest expectations? Perhaps only being a grandparent. And what did I expect—that I, a granny, would come to Cuddle Party and be the belle of the ball? A loving husband had made me ridiculously self-confident.

I slunk out before the closing circle. “I have to catch my train,” I said at the door, revealing myself as a suburbanite. I was suddenly eager to return to the man who’d cuddle me whenever I wanted, no consent required.

My husband was asleep when I crept into bed, with his back facing me, which I prefer. I snuggled against his back and put one leg over him. In sleep, he held my foot.

I was home.

A few days later, I got a message from the German woman. She’d come down with Covid and asked how I felt.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if I’d caught Covid at Cuddle Party . . . merely through conversation?

But no. I hadn’t caught Covid. I’d taken the latest vaccine, and I was fine.

The only thing I caught at Cuddle Party was a blow to my vanity. . . and I was already beginning to recover.

A version of this piece was first published in HuffPost last year.