Hi, I've searched on "eye contact" and as you'd expect hundreds of posts come up, so without an advanced search I can't easily check if my question already has an answer here.
I've heard others say that giving eye contact is painful, and I've started telling people that this is the case for me because I can agree that it is, but I wondered if I experience it in the same way as others do.
The way I describe the pain is like an extreme fatigue. I ask people to imagine they have been up for 36 hours, are starting to nod off somewhere warm and comfy, but someone won't stop talking to them and is keeping them awake - *that* kind of fatigue, but felt in the eyes (more specifically, above the eyes but below the eyebrows).
Does that ring true with anyone?
I'll also cite an example where I was talking one on one with someone, and they were being very kind, and when I came to say "Thank you, I appreciate that very much." I simply *could not* look at them, and couldn't even divert to their mouth as I usually do, but instead looked at a point on the wall a meter to the side of their head. I seemed to have no control over this.
Finally, as others have said in the posts that came up in my search, it's not straightforward because it's dependant on the meaning / intimacy of the eye contact. Once I was on a training course where we did an exercise of pairing up and maintaining unbroken eye contact for two solid minutes! I was able to do this at the time, because we were both in the same boat; awkward, uncomfortable, but determined and viewing it as a pure physics science experiment with no underlying meaning. At the other end of the scale, at our running club recently we were asked to pair up and throw tennis balls to each other and even turning to face towards someone, and "pair with" someone - even from 5 to 10m away - whom I didn't know that well felt too intimate and uncomfortable.
