I usually only visit my family a couple times a year. I always notice when I do visit them how much I had been missing being able to hug someone.

I'm glad articles like this are helping to raise awareness of the dimensions of interaction we've suppressed in recent years. As important as boundaries are, we also have to acknowledge our natures as physical, tactile, animal creatures. We're not mere Enlightenment-era conceptions of beings of pure reason. We're embedded and embodied and have millions of years of programming to make us what we are. In the same way that modern societies have learned about the issues of unhealthy repression of things like sexuality, we also have to take care that we don't repress things like touch or aggression, which are in our nature and actually do have legitimate places in our being. We wouldn't be comfortable with alienation and isolation in our pets; we're not so different.