Don't Stand So Close to Me

Don’t Stand So Close to Me

Who are you? I mean, who are you really? How many people know the answer to that question? How close do you let people get to the real you? We talk about “letting someone in”, but what does that really mean? Where is “in”? I have been studying and observing body language and characteristics of human interaction for some time now, and I have developed a theory. Please keep in mind that this theory is not intended to be scientific or precisely literal. It is instead a kind of allegorical comparison.

Lift one arm up in front of you. Hold it out straight at shoulder height, then lift your hand so that it faces palm out. I would suggest that distance from your palm to your chest is roughly your concept of your personal space, although of course that distance is dependent on many social and cultural factors. It turns out there is actually quite a bit of research on personal space (in the social sciences it’s referred to as proxemics, if you want a fancy word for it) that supports my idea. I won’t go into a lot of detail about the research here, but proxemics was created in 1963 by a cultural anthropologist named Edward T. Hall, and he suggested human beings have 4 zones of personal space from intimate (from 1 to 18 inches), to personal (1.5 – 4 feet), to social (4-12 feet) to public speaking (12-25 feet). My supposition dovetails with his, that our personal space is about the length of our arms. But why is that? If someone else steps inside our personal space, whatever that space is for each of us, we feel uncomfortable and vulnerable, but why?

“At arm’s length” is an expression that has been used since the mid-1600s, and it’s a term I’m sure we’re all familiar with. The expression uses a physical distance, the length of one’s arm, to describe the distance someone must be away from us to ensure physical safety (can’t be grabbed or hit) and emotional safety (avoidance of intimacy). So why would we associate keeping someone an arm’s length away from us with avoidance of intimacy? This is where my theory comes in. I believe that most of us learn early in our lives that it is dangerous to be too open or honest about who we are or what we care about. We learn to hide our true selves, and to create a persona of what we think will be acceptable to others, and that will hide our insecurities, weaknesses, character flaws, and so on. I believe that we create an image of ourselves from that persona, and we project that image out in front of us so that people will see that image and think it is our true self, when really that image exists to hide our true self instead. As with any projected image, it cannot stand too close of a scrutiny or it will reveal itself as a fraudulent image, so we cannot let others too close to us. We keep people “at arm’s length”.

By the time I was about 18, I had mastered this technique so well that I could maintain a huge collection of these projected images of my perceived self, and switch them effortlessly depending on who I was with. I like to say I could stand in a circle of people representing every social strata of my life, from family and friends to peers, authority figures, church people, school people, work people – you name it. I could turn in that circle and flip the image that I projected of my self effortlessly from one group to the next, constantly changing to become who I wanted them to think I was, or who I thought they wanted me to be. The problem was that I lost who I really was, because at that time of my life I even hid from my judgement of myself, so I was always wearing a false face to one degree or another, and the vulnerable parts of me were always hidden as deep as possible. Now I try never to lie to myself, so I always see my true face, but it has taken me a long time to figure out what that true face looked like, and how to share it with others. I lived in lies for many years because I was not willing to be vulnerable, and it’s still hard to let people see behind that projected self.

I started this blog along with my speaking business with the hope that together we can learn to be part of a true community, sharing joy and pain, being vulnerable and open, supporting each other and growing together, but that hope will not truly become a reality if we are all “at arm’s length” from others. So where is your comfort zone? What will it take to bring you to a willingness to take down the projected you and share the real you with flaws and weaknesses and all? If you are already able to live transparently to that extent, how did you get there? How do you maintain it? We all need to learn how to have truly genuine, intimate relationships with the people in our lives, because if you’re holding someone at arm’s length it means they can’t hug you…