The Ultimate Body Language Book

Chapter 4 – Space and Territory
Space And Eye Contact
Eye contact avoidance tells others that we aren’t interested in what’s being sold.
You can imagine that strangers walking about in public want to maintain a certain degree of separation
between one another. This can and is achieved through eye contact. Reducing or preventing eye contact
is a way to tell other people that they wish to maintain their space and privacy, and do not wish to
communicate with others. Eye contact is a function of intimacy and has been referred to as part of the
equilibrium state. That is, eye contact is one component that controls the degree of intimacy, the other
is distance. By controlling one or the other, or both, we can control aspects of our equilibrium state, or
intimacy, such as whether it will start at all, and how or when it should end. You can imagine that full
intimacy can not happen at great distances although telephones and web technology attempt to do
otherwise. Each fails miserably and does intimacy no justice.
As distance increases, intimacy decreases so you can imagine that strangers would feel freer to glare at
others from say, across the road, but as they near the point at which they intersect they will drop or
avert their eyes so as to eliminate intimacy. Therefore, that which gives permission for staring is
distance and that which protects intimacy is eye contact. To have real intimacy both proximity and eye
contact must be present. By this argument, city people aren’t rude at all, they are just doing what is
normal, avoiding unwanted intimacy from strangers. Rural settings where there is a real possibility that
you actually know the person on the street, or know a relative of the person is large, so intimacy is not
only permitted by also safe. Eye contact in the city can send the wrong message to the wrong person
inviting unwanted contact.
To illustrate this point imagine a women who is happily married but otherwise attractive to men. Upon
entering a coffee shop, she turns the heads of men. When she notices that she is being watched, she
averts her gaze and instead of making eye contact she ‘looks over the heads of others’ or possibly even
looking down her nose at them by tilting her head backward showing disapproval. She sends a
disinterested message, an “I’m taken.” If startled, she might inadvertently make eye contact with a