Wedding is the cream of cuddling

“Wedding is the cream of cuddling” is Victoria McCandless’s formulation of intimacy as a continuum: sexual love is a heightened form of affection, not a separate activity detached from everyday tenderness. In A Loving Economy, the phrase gives her proposal a compact, memorable image while challenging the sexual conventions she believed made love fearful and transactional.

Meaning and Formulation

Victoria links “wedding” to cuddling rather than setting it apart from it. She describes cuddling as nourishment that can sustain health throughout life, and marriage or sexual love as its “cream”—a particular delight within a more encompassing form of care. The metaphor makes sexual intimacy neither the whole of love nor an exceptional commodity: it is a concentrated pleasure continuous with affection.

Intimacy as Nourishment

The argument rests on Victoria’s claim that touch and closeness have value beyond sexual activity. “Cuddling is like milk. It can, and should, nourish our health from birth to death.” She objects that teaching, including that of Marie Stopes, separates sexual love from cuddling and advertises it as “a rare commodity.” In Victoria’s account, this separation encourages men who have been deprived of affection to fear sexual love or treat it as “a smash-and-grab business.” The phrase therefore joins a theory of intimacy to a critique of how people are taught to experience it.

Controversy and Reception

The language drew sharply different readings. In a letter to George Bernard Shaw, Beatrice Webb reported Victoria’s terminology as “Cuddles is her word for love-making, she calls fornication wedding.” Webb described the pamphlet as “quite sex-mad,” treating its language as evidence of scandalous preoccupation. The contrast matters: Victoria presents cuddling as ordinary, sustaining care, while Webb’s account frames the same vocabulary as sexual eccentricity. The phrase’s gentle metaphor thus carried a challenge to prevailing boundaries around respectable speech and sexual love.