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Social Pressure for Eye contact

I'm done with Christmas Cards

I think I could endure social contact a lot easier if I could give myself permission to say "Eye contact hurts so I'll be looking at this coffee cup whilst we talk" and then do it.

But to get there requires unlearning decades of learned adaptation.

One reason I enjoy the social aspects of my running club so much is that there can't possibly be any expectation of eye contact when you're running next to someone. We also often run at a comfortable pace so that chatting is possible, and once I'm on an interesting topic I enjoy chatting (and yes, listening too :-) ) with running friends enormously.

One thing that seems difficult to convey to people is that, yes, I *can* do eye contact and each individual look doesn't cost that much (at least to start with) but over time each look gets harder and there comes a point where I'm exhausted.

No particular question here, just sharing.

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  • I have great difficulty with eye contact - it feels unbelievably invasive to me.

    When talking with blokes, eye contact is not normally required because we are all looking at the subject matter - the engine or the aeroplane.

    When talking to women, my occasional glances are seen as flirty and coy.  My inability to process and respond fast enough to their twittering makes me seem to be a good listener.

    My wife says it's hilarious watching women practically throw themselves at me whilst I'm completely oblivious.

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  • I have great difficulty with eye contact - it feels unbelievably invasive to me.

    When talking with blokes, eye contact is not normally required because we are all looking at the subject matter - the engine or the aeroplane.

    When talking to women, my occasional glances are seen as flirty and coy.  My inability to process and respond fast enough to their twittering makes me seem to be a good listener.

    My wife says it's hilarious watching women practically throw themselves at me whilst I'm completely oblivious.

Children
  • in reply to Plastic

    Interesting thoughts - in my case, if I'm looking at a thing like an engine, motorbike, diy work or radio equipment I'd rather do it alone than with someone next to me pointing at it. The exception in my life was when my dad used to help me with things like putting new valve seals on my car engine - lots of looking at the thing then. So this doesn't generally help me out when talking to men. At work for instance, the discussion is mostly about ideas that aren't physically present and eye contact is the norm ("over coffee"). Outside work I just try to avoid people :-).

    I actually find women easier to talk to than men. For some reason almost all of the "typical" peer-bonding vehicles used by men are of no interest to me. My interest in making sense of myself, psychology, life, even sexuality maybe, means that I tend to find more interesting and freely-evolving discussions with women than with men. That last sentence is clearly laden with assumptions about sexual stereotypes, but is simply a statement of my experience. There's also the fact that I find social and intellectual intimacy with men awkward and a little threatening.