Personal Boundaries
Personal boundaries, or rather, how much they can vary between cultures and individuals, are quite interesting. In my local culture it seems that people are extremely hesitant to even get too close, let alone touch other people, unless it has already been established that such proximity is permissible. This is of course in no way universal, as there are plenty of “touchy-feely” people who were born and raised in this area, but whose personal boundaries are more lax for any number of reasons, like their families having broader comfort zones. But it can create a strange, awkward, uncomfortable, or misinterpretable situation when two people with wildly different boundaries encounter one another.
Here I am talking about something specific – not the obvious situation where say, some guy stands with his face two inches from your face, talking to you with foul bologna breath. I am talking about a situation where for one person the crossing of the boundaries means something, such as being interpreted as flirting or sexual advance, but for the “crosser” means absolutely nothing, and is just a part of how they interact with others. And of course it is only exacerbated by a pre-existent sexual attraction. This kind of situation screams with the potential for disaster if said sexual attraction is one-sided, and so it leaves one wondering how to proceed in interactions with people who have such different boundaries.
While I mostly recognize the boundaries established by my local culture – and by this new (or resurgent) social climate of sexual deviance and sensitivity to sexual harassment – I find them to be quite restrictive. What this means is that I think I am innately a tactile person, but I am inhibited from expressing myself in that way by externally imposed and internally reinforced anxieties. I have yet to grasp how to strike a balance between respecting the more mandatory social boundaries – enforced by the greater society and my own personal ethics – and when to allow flexibility, as in those situations where I might want to cross the usual boundaries. And so I default to the position of never crossing unless permission is given more or less explicitly, but I feel that it inhibits my ability to communicate with others, making me appear more reserved, aloof, or even cold than I wish to be.