Leave cuddliness for the fabric softeners

While browsing through online dating profiles last night, I was reminded of yet another one of my pet peeves...

Although, if I may digress for a moment, I have so many peeves nowadays that it's misleading to call any of them "pet". "Pet" suggests a beloved, cossetted individual, and nobody has as many pets as I have peeves unless they're one of those crazy old cat ladies. It would be more accurate to say that I have a vast herd of peeves, roaming proud and free across the wide open praries of my psyche.

But leaving that aside, as I was saying I stumbled across one of my pet peeves: gay men who think that "cuddling" is a good idea.

To my mind, a cuddle is not a laudable goal, unless you are a particularly clingy toddler. The desire to be cuddled is cute in little kids but rather pathetic in grown men. There's an element of wanting intimacy without any of the adult connotations, and a sense of neediness. And most of the time neediness is a very unattractive quality.

Maybe I'm being unfair. Maybe it's just the word itself. Cuddle. It looks and sounds childish, like "Muggle" or "giggle". If you removed it from a profile and replaced it with "embrace" or "hold you in my arms", the idea would start to look a little more mature. "I want to hold you" sounds romantic; "I want to cuddle you" sounds wet.

Still, if I see a profile which states "I like cuddling and snuggling on the couch," I automatically assume that he is not the man for me. There's a chance I'm missing out in doing this, but there's an even bigger chance that I'm avoiding a whole bunch of girly flakes.