Is Professional Cuddling Expensive?

When someone asks me why my sessions are so expensive, you can bet the next words out of my mouth will be "compared to what?"

What I think people mean when they say professional cuddling is expensive is actually:

"Why should I pay you when I could get cuddling for free?"

"What makes your cuddling professional work?"

"What makes you think you can charge for just cuddling?"

I think people don't understand the skillsets and level of work that goes into being a professional cuddler. So let's talk about that.

Let's say we have a straight man on his journey looking for cuddles. Let's call him George.

If George decided that professional cuddling is too expensive, the next best thing for him would be to find a cuddle buddy, a cuddle enthusiast or a "friend with benefits" (in this case, the benefit being cuddles).

George would need to find a friend that wants to do this too. In general, his friend needs to be not dating anybody that wouldn't be okay with this, trust him, and feel good about cuddling with him.

If George has social anxiety, asking someone to do this could be a source of crippling fear. But let's say he doesn't, he asks someone to be his cuddle buddy, and they start cuddling together. Problem solved, right?

Well, not quite. A cuddle buddy situation is very volatile. It could end because someone gets into a relationship and the cuddle buddies need to stop because of it. It could stop if the cuddling gets awkward. It could even stop because they end up not being a great person to talk about work and problems without being told what to do and many other things.

Even though professional cuddling costs money, there are quite a few skill sets that go into it—relational skills, an understanding of boundaries, and schedule reliability.

On this particular night, unlike most professional cuddlers, George's cuddle buddy might not be very reliable as far as scheduling goes. They plan to see each other Friday, and then when he texts her on Friday morning she texts back that afternoon, "sorry, I'm swamped with work and have to stay late." Damn!

So what other options does George have other than to pay someone for his needs?

Let's say he goes to see a massage therapist instead of a professional cuddler because he still can't justify paying for cuddling yet.

He sees a massage therapist and he gets some bad kinks worked out of his body, which feels nice and certainly has its benefits. But unlike with his cuddle buddy, he can't talk during the session or touch his massage therapist back. It's a non-emotional, one-way touch session and he leaves still feeling unfulfilled for some reason.

His problem seems to be that he can't get a two-way touch, and he liked that with his cuddle buddy before. But where else can he go for that?

An escort? Maybe. George decides to go online and see if he can find one he likes. Sure, they offer way more than just cuddling, but at least he'd be able to touch them too, right?

George reads profile after profile, and he starts to notice that there's a lot of differences in what each escort will and won't do, and some of them even explicitly say they won't cuddle. George is not one to turn down sex, but that's not what he most wants today. He wants to cuddle, talk and be listened to.

He continues searching, and he finds a few other profiles on the site until he finds one he likes that seems like she'd be easy to talk to. But before he dials her number, he sees her rate at the bottom of the page and his jaw drops. He knew escorts were expensive, but this one is easily ten times more than the professional cuddlers he was considering seeing. He doesn't have the money for that today.

So George closes the tabs to the escort site. He decides to watch TV and drink beer at home instead, getting slowly drunk enough to temporarily forget his snuggle struggles.

Over the weekend, he goes and sees his therapist talk about what's on his mind these days. The therapist is great at helping him identify what's going on in his life, listening to his issues with his cuddle buddy, and helping him use new tools to work through the emotional struggles and assess how he's been coping with it, but he still feels pretty isolated and unsure if he can have a better life doing all of these things his therapist tells him to do. There are tons of emotional support and skillsets that he learns from his therapist for coping and emotionally bettering himself, but there's no touch at all from his therapist and George still feels distant.

George reaches out to his cuddle buddy and she texts him back, "um, right, I meant to tell you... I got back together with my ex over the weekend, so I don't think I can keep doing this anymore."

George feels dejected, deflated, and very much so defeated. He has spent a lot of time and money on things that weren't professional cuddling to avoid seeing a professional cuddler, and he still didn't get what he wanted out of it all.

And overall, it was more expensive than just going to see one and getting exactly what he wanted.