By Melissa Franks, Certified Platonic Cuddler, Cuddle Party Facilitator, and Founder of Embrace Club
Published · 9 min read
When I started doing this work in 2020, I had a picture in my head of who would walk through my door. I was wrong about almost all of it.
Most people assume professional cuddling is for the lonely. After 6 years in this work, I can tell you it's not. The people who actually book sessions are wellness-minded adults, high-stress professionals, recently single people, remote workers, neurodivergent clients, people in recovery, and people unlearning what they were taught about touch. If you've ever wondered whether you'd be a fit, keep reading and see if what I'm talking about sounds familiar.
Six years and hundreds of sessions later, the most surprising thing about professional cuddling isn't the work itself. It's who shows up for it. If you've never booked a session, it might be easy to assume that those who do are lonely. And I want to be precise, because there's a difference between loneliness and solitude, that we often overlook. I think of loneliness as something that happens to you or a way that you feel, whereas solitude is something you choose. The line between them isn't always clean, but the distinction is important because most of my clients aren't lonely in the first sense.
Some are, and those clients are some of the most rewarding to work with. I'll come back to them. But the majority are people in solitude who've decided, intentionally, that physical closeness is something they want to arrange for in their lives. That's a different population than the one most people picture, and it's the one this post is mostly about.
What I've actually seen is a much wider range of people than the cultural script allows for. Some have full lives. Others are in transition. Some are healing from something specific, and others simply consider touch part of how they take care of themselves, the same way they consider sleep or movement or time outside. Here's the real shape of who books professional cuddling, drawn from six years of watching my own door.
This is the group most people don't picture, and it might be the largest one I see. They take their physical and mental health seriously, and they take it seriously before there's a problem to fix. They eat well, they have therapists they like, they exercise, they protect their sleep. Touch is one more input they've decided to take seriously.
They tend to book regularly rather than when feeling like they are in crisis. A standing monthly session, sometimes more often. They show up rested, talk easily, and use the time to drop into their bodies in a way that the rest of their week doesn't allow. For them, professional cuddling is a kind of maintenance or self-care rather than a specific remedy. It's the same reason someone might get a massage every three weeks even though there's nothing acutely wrong.
Doctors between shifts, lawyers carrying a heavy caseload, founders riding the emotional ups and downs that come with running something, parents of young kids who are technically off the clock but never actually off. These clients don't have a touch problem. What they have is a nervous system that's been running hot for so long it's forgotten how to come down.
They tend to book during the worst stretches, not the calm ones. The cuddling time is the only time they get to themselves. There's nothing to decide, nothing to manage, nowhere else to be.
What I've noticed with this group is how quickly their bodies drop once they're given permission to. The first ten minutes are sometimes spent talking, because talking is the off-ramp. Then something shifts and they're quiet, and often asleep within the half-hour. They wake up at the end and tell me they hadn't realized how tired they were. Most of them hadn't.
For these clients, professional cuddling isn't really about touch in the way the word usually implies. It's about being held still by something other than themselves for a while. The touch is just the mechanism for what they actually came for, which is the recalibration.
These clients aren't necessarily heartbroken. They're suddenly without the steady physical presence of another person, and they feel it. The end of a relationship leaves a logistical gap as well as an emotional one, and the logistical gap registers in the body before the mind catches up. No one to share the bed with. No one in the kitchen while you cook.
They often book a single cuddle session out of curiosity and then come back. They tend to use the work as a bridge while they figure out what they want next. Some start dating again and stop coming. Others keep coming because they realize they don't want to date casually just to feel held, and they'd rather take their time on the dating part with the touch part handled separately.
Someone who has realized, often after looking up from a stretch of focused work, that they have gone two weeks without anyone touching them. Nothing is wrong with their life. They have friends, family, a social calendar. The structure of their days simply doesn't naturally include physical contact, and the absence has quietly accumulated.
This client tends to be analytical about the booking. They've thought about it for a while, weighed it, and decided it was rational. The cuddle session itself is often the easiest part for them, because once they're there, the body knows what to do. The hard part was giving themselves permission to take touch as seriously as they take everything else.
Touch in the wild is unpredictable. The question of whether the person you're meeting expects a hug or a handshake, the shifting and unwritten rules of physical closeness in social settings. For many neurodivergent clients, the unpredictability is exactly what makes everyday touch difficult.
A cuddle session is the opposite of unpredictable. The container is clear, the consent is explicit, the duration is known, and the social negotiation is ongoing, not something you have to figure out on your own. Several of my regular clients describe this as the first time they've experienced sustained physical contact without the cognitive overhead of managing it. The structure isn't a workaround for the touch; it's part of why the touch works.
People who have gotten sober and discovered that a lot of what they'd been numbing was the absence of safe physical closeness. Or that the closeness they did have was tangled up with using, and now that they're sober they don't quite know how to be in their body around other people without something taking the edge off.
This isn't about replacing the substance. The clients I see in this category are usually deep in their own recovery work already, with sponsors, programs, and therapists in place. What they don't always have is a low-stakes way to practice being held by another person while sober and present, without the social complexity of dating or the unpredictability of casual touch. A cuddle session is a structured environment to feel what safe, sober contact actually feels like in the body, sometimes for the first time in years.
The early sessions are often quieter than people expect. There's a lot of nervous-system noise to settle before touch can become restful. We go slowly. I'm not a recovery professional and I don't try to be; this work runs alongside the real recovery work my clients are doing elsewhere. What it offers is something specific that's hard to find anywhere else: the chance to relearn that another person's presence can feel safe, and that you can receive it without having to manage how the other person is feeling.
People who grew up in communities where physical contact had a lot of rules around it. Touch outside of marriage was off-limits, or affection was scarce, or the body was something to be managed rather than inhabited. Religious traditions, strict family cultures, purity-coded households. The specifics vary, but the result tends to be similar: an adult who left that environment and found that the rules came with them, lodged somewhere below conscious thought.
These clients often arrive having done a lot of intellectual work already. They've thought through what they believe now, made their peace with leaving, and built lives that look very different from the ones they were raised in. What they haven't been able to think their way through is the body's response to closeness: the bracing, the dissociation, the strange guilt that surfaces during contact that any outside observer would call innocent. The mind moved on, but the body is still catching up.
A cuddle session gives them a place to let the body have its own timeline. Touch with no romantic charge, no expectation, no ambiguity about what it is or where it's going. For some clients this is the first time they've experienced sustained physical closeness without an internal alarm going off. The first few sessions can be tearful, sometimes for reasons they can't articulate. That's usually a good sign. It means something is moving.
What I've noticed most with this group is how relieved they are to learn that wanting this isn't a sign of anything being wrong with them. It's a sign of being human, in a body, after years of being told the body was a problem to solve.
No. Legitimate professional cuddling is platonic by definition. Professionals and clients keep their clothes on, we don't touch sexually, and we don't exchange fluids. If arousal comes up, we don't take it in a sexual direction.
After you arrive and change into comfortable clothes, you'll fill out a consent form. You'll also have the chance to adjust anything to your preferences — the lighting, the music, the temperature. I'll ask you how you'd like to start your session, and we go from there. If you'd like to talk first, we can do that. If you'd prefer to take small steps, that's okay. If you don't feel like cuddling at all during the session, that's also okay — it doesn't mean you're wasting the time. You're meant to do what feels comfortable. Cuddling doesn't happen in complete silence either. We check in with each other throughout, because preferences shift. A timer lets us know when there are 10 minutes left.
It's safe when it's done by someone with clear boundaries and training. The legitimate profession has standards and consent practices that protect both clients and practitioners. Before I book a new client, we have a video conversation, or the client provides some information through messages, so we both know what to expect. Sessions happen in the professional's home, the client's home, or spaces like the Embrace Club studio or hotels. The location is something we decide together, based on what feels safest for both of us. You can stop the session at any time. Legitimate sessions are sober sessions.
This is one of the most common questions and one of the most worried-about, so it's worth answering directly. Bodies do what bodies do. A passing physical response during sustained close contact is normal and doesn't mean anything is wrong, on either side. What matters is what you do with it. The boundary in this work is about behavior, not about involuntary biology. Trained practitioners are prepared for this and handle it without making it weird — usually a small adjustment in position is all that's needed. If a response feels distracting or uncomfortable for you, you can say so and we'll change something. The fear of this is almost always bigger than the actual experience.
No. A session isn't 60 or 90 minutes of continuous physical contact. There's talking, there's stillness, sometimes there's space where we're sitting near each other but not touching. Some clients want a lot of physical closeness, others want very little, and most fall somewhere in between. What you want can also change within a single session, and that's fine. The session is yours to use, and what you need from it on a given day is what we do.
Worth saying directly, because the answer matters.
Legitimate professional cuddling isn't sexual. The real profession has standards and practitioners who don't blur lines.
People who are in a hard mental health stretch and need real clinical support are usually better served by a therapist first; this work can sit alongside therapy beautifully, but it isn't a substitute for it.
The takeaway for me has been that the people who book professional cuddling aren't unusual and aren't one type. They're a cross-section of adults who have decided, for a wide range of reasons, that physical contact is a real human need, and that arranging for it on purpose is reasonable. Some come to heal. Others come for maintenance. Plenty are in transition. What most of them share is paying attention to a part of themselves that the rest of their life doesn't naturally tend to.
If you've read this far and recognized yourself in one of these descriptions, or in something I didn't quite name, it's something worth looking into. Most of my clients booked their first cuddle session not because they were sure, but because they were curious enough to try. That tends to be enough. The rest takes care of itself.
Melissa Franks
Certified Platonic Cuddler, Cuddle Party Facilitator, and Founder of Embrace Club
Melissa Franks is a Certified Platonic Cuddler, Cuddle Party Facilitator, and Founder of Embrace Club. When she's not cuddling with strangers, she's cuddling with her cat Pompóm and doing kundalini meditation.
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