Kids, in the autumn of 2017, your Spirit Mom, Uncle T and I were having one of our daily WhatsApp conversations about life, work and crushes when Tendai threw a curveball at us…

We’d been discussing his latest cougar crush and teasing him about all of the very naughty things he wanted to do to her and he stopped my and Leo’s decidedly NSFW (not safe for work) lewd talk with this one liner:

“No, I just want to hug her and tell her that everything is going to be okay. That’s all I wanna do”

Leo and I both hit back with “What’s that code for?” and “Why does a guy just want to cuddle and hold? That doesn’t make sense!” because come on, hugs from guys ALWAYS meant they wanted more, right? RIGHT?

Nope…according to Lord Grey, sometimes a hug from a guy who likes you or whom you like is just that …a bloody hug.

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT????

Leo and I were floored, crushed, heartbroken, DEVASTATED.

As your Spirit Mom put it:

“I feel like my entire life’s outlook has just been turned upside down. I’m so confused now “

 

As for me, my world was spinning on its axis because those bone-crushing hugs that bordered on the inappropriate that I received from Monroe ( remember him?) still topped my all-time favourite crushee moments!

My mind was blown:

 

Leo was struggling with all the guys she turned away in her youth when they hugged her and said “Come to my flat and see my etchings”, thinking it was the 90s version of “Netflix and chill”. I was having a hard time seeing all those “moments” I thought I’d had with Monroe and past versions of him going up in smoke.

Lord Grey had messed us up worse than any of our previous “sandwich” experiences… F*** a zombie!

Tendai, realising how this had fundamentally changed my and Leo’s entire man-woman relations ideals, expanded on his theory a bit more:

“A man’s thoughts aren’t always the worst. Ya, we wanna get in and get out…that’s 90 – 95% of our thoughts but then there are those moments we wanna cuddle. Cuddling is a warm, relaxing and comforting feeling… especially after a long day.

He continued to drop this bombshell with:

“It’s platonic. Guys have no intentions for anything more. Just cuddling and maybe talk through the night. Just to forget about the madness of the world. It’s like how a woman says “Let’s go for a drink” and a guy thinks it’s code meanwhile, it’s literally just a drink!”

It would take days, weeks even, for Leo and I to recover from this explosive news…and when we chatted to other women about it, they’d had similar reactions. Life, as we knew it, was no longer the same…