Abashed Aside and Some Thoughts on Proxemics

From now on, I am only allowed to use the words "gender role" if I have had a solid seven hours of sleep. Seriously, the last thing I want here is to traffic in ludicrous generalities and glib summations of complicated issues. I had a few conversations today stemming from last night's post that will be very helpful when I revisit this subject, but to the thousands of men out there who make the dentists' appointments (and the perhaps two that have access to this blog), I apologize. My bad. I'm not retracting everything or even most of what I said, I just didn't say it well or at sufficient length--not to mention the generalization problem that is the heart of all bad personal essays. I know better; again, and play your tiny violins for me, I was exhausted.

Now, some thoughts on one of the big subjects I am mulling over, and by big, I mean I am hoping possibly book-worthy (sigh, the hedging of "hoping" and "possibly"). Have you ever heard the word "proxemics?" I hadn't either until fairly recently. It means "the study of the spatial requirements of humans and animals and the effects of population density on behavior, communication, and social interaction." A lovely lunch I had some months ago with a brilliant editor and writer started me thinking about this in earnest, and I think--after quite a bit of thinking and some reading and research--I am ready to start writing about it. (It's even harder on a blog than in a plain old essay to get to your point, I am learning as I go along; there's so much explication that I would skip if I didn't know anyone was reading this with a venue in which to write back.)

Jumping in: If you went to college, you most likely have lived in a dorm at some point. If you went to boarding school, you lived in a dorm for a solid eight years. I want you to close your eyes and think back--far, far for some of us, now--and remember who your best friends were. Are any of them still your friends now? Now, picture your dorm room, and their dorm room. I am willing to bet, stake money on the fact, that your best friends then, and even more likely any you stayed in touch with over the intervening years, lived not much more than a couple doors down.

Does that ever strike you as odd? If your college was anything like mine, there was a dorm next door, say twenty yards away, and your first friends, your closest friends, did not live there; they lived on your hall. Was this because we were too lazy or incapacitated in some way to walk five minutes to that dorm next door and make friends with some of those people, who were busy befriending each other? Of course not, and eventually you did, I did--I even married one of them. But was it just an enormous coincidence that the handful of close friends I made right away, four of whom are still among my very closest friends, just happened to be assigned adjoining dorm rooms?

If I'd asked you before writing any of this--which maybe would have been a better experiment--on what basis you form friendships, formed them in college, I'd be willing to bet again that you would not have said "proximity." You may have said personality or shared interests or values or experience, but you would not have said "lives next door." But time and again, this situation asserts itself: You are more likely to form relationships with people who are in closest proximity to you, even if more likely candidates for relationships based on more relevant-seeming criteria--are only ever so slightly less proximal.

Anyway, this is just a toe in the water. There will be much more on this subject, which gets more interesting, I promise. And maybe I will change the name of this blog to "sevenhundredfiftywords before 11 p.m." We could all avoid some discomfort, I think.