In Defense of the Handshake

Thank God it’s not dead

Will Leitch
Forge
Published in
3 min readJun 1, 2021

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Photo: CSA Images/Getty Images

The entire pandemic, I’ve been hearing about things that Covid-19 may or may not have killed. Business travel. Buffets. Birthday candles. Snow days. I’m not sure all, or any, of these things are really going to go away: Human nature has a tendency to snap back to a certain base level of accepted normalcy, and I’m not sure one (incredibly tumultuous!) year is going to upset that applecart for centuries to come. And I hope not. Because I really love shaking hands.

Shaking hands was suppose to go away, wasn’t it? It’s strange that we remained — and in many ways still remain — so averse to that sort of human contact deep into the pandemic, even past the point when we understand that Covid-19 was a disease spread through the air, not through the hands. I suspect the reason for it was more psychological than physiological: We had grown so accustomed to being away from other people that touching them seemed unfathomable. The formal artifice of the handshake, or casually hugging strangers, was a relic, a timepiece from the age Before.

But I gotta say: One of the first things I did after being fully vaccinated was looking a friend in the eye and…

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Published in Forge

A former publication from Medium on personal development. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Will Leitch
Will Leitch

Written by Will Leitch

Author seven books, including “How Lucky” "The Time Has Come" and "Lloyd McNeil's Last Ride." NYMag/MLB. Founder Deadspin. https://williamfleitch.substack.com

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