Tried It: Not touching people

Look at me, having normal human interaction

In college, I accidentally conducted a large social experiment in not touching people.

You see, back in high school, a hug or vigorous high-five was a social requirement both at greeting and parting. At least among my friends. If you were at a house party, you started to leave a good twenty minutes before you had to go because you needed to go around and embrace every single person. To do otherwise would have been cold or rude.

My college was a different scene. First of all, I didn't know these people so well. Secondly, it was a church college with strict rules about contact been men and women and what felt to me like a fair amount of sexual repression layered on top. And admittedly, there was a part of me that was a little weary of all the hugging, as snuggly as I generally am.

Social circles and their norms form quickly in the freshmen year of college. I didn't start off hugging my college friends as a routine thing, and so that became the pattern. Handshakes or high-fives fell that way too, being mostly reserved for meeting someone new or agreeing to something. Soon it was a verbal greeting, maybe a wave to the room when I came into somewhere, a quick tip of my hat and a little bit of eye contact on the way out. It was tidy.

Now I don't want to oversimplify. I have a lot of ambivalence about my time in college. I had some great times, did some cool things, spent time with some great people. But I also made some social choices I wouldn't make again today, the most severe of which was spreading myself too thin. Trying to be a part of too many social circles, I felt like a guest in all of them. And I wielded a lack of self-awareness that now makes me cringe. Blame it on finding myself or something.

But when I compare the four years I spent in high school with the four years I spent in college, one big big difference is that it seems to me I rarely touched my college friends, whereas my high school friends and I had frequent platonic physical affection. And today, I am in regular contact with many of my high school friends and zero of my college friends (outside of Facebook, and I am aware of the irony that a good chunk of the people who read this will come via Facebook).

Touch is a powerful thing. And it can be fraught. You don't have to look far to find stories of people, men especially, feeling a too free to touch. And some people straight up do not like to be touched. One does not, for example, touch the Queen of England, I am told.

Lyndon Johnson liked to grab people by the elbow or upper arm while talking with them. He also stood way too close to people and did other things to make them uncomfortable while making agreement with him the easiest way to escape, so don't necessarily emulate everything he did.

But these days, I lean toward appropriate touching of people. I shake hands, I hug, I high-five and jostle. When I rub shoulders with someone accidentally at a party, I smile instead of apologizing. Something in a welcome touch bonds people, reminds them that it's another human they're with. And I like the people I know too much to forgo that connection.