Eye Contact

It's a funny thing body language. We are sending out non verbal signals to the environment without even thinking about it. Desmond Morris, inveterate people watcher  and anthropologist suggests this is behaviour we all developed to cope with life as hunter gatherers thousands of years ago.

I wonder how ancient hunter gatherer techniques relate to travelling on buses?

Not for the first time I have noticed how uncomfortable people are when I sit opposite the.m on a bus. Not just those directly in front of me but rows and rows back.

I first noticed it when finding my way back to town after dropping my abomination of auto engineering Renault have passed off as a car, at a garage to have yet another fault rectified at vast expense. I caught the bus but the only seat left was a rear facing seat where the emergency exit was. I took my seat and off we jolly well went. The  back row was entirely made up of middle aged and largely overweight men with arms folded across ample bellies with a look of stern concentration on their faces. When I was a kid all the hardcases would go to the back and you could determine your position in the pecking order that was the school jungle. from Girls at the very front to sociopaths at the rear window. That was in the day when being a sociopath was felt to be a required trait. For these men, it seemed to me nothing had changed. 

It was soon apparent that my position was making them uncomfortable. No one need make eye contact as a rule as we all face the direction of travel. But not today. I had no choice but front them out and it seemed to cause a little shifting of the seats. 

The same thing happened today as I sallied forth on my local bus for want of something better to do. The last seat left was this time right near the front but it seemed to give people a problem about where to look as we all constantly strove to avoid eye contact.

So in this situation eye contact is bad but just about every where else I am taught to make eye contact all the time. It seems that on a bus we don't want to make any human connections at all.

It seems to me that the more you learn about body language the less you understand. I have a book called Manwatching by Desmond Morris. It is a thick and well filled book. What is alarming to me is that it is about stuff most people understand naturally. 

I have watched a bunch of videos about flirting and how to recognise it. These usually include a man and a woman interacting and showing off all the usual movements that signify attraction. So having seen all this I am then told that I must look for clusters of traits! So I not only have to recognize all these signals individually but also make note of how many of them the other person is giving off. I tell you it is impossible. Those that are good at it just naturally understand the signals. 

I am not one of them!