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In Defense of the Handshake
Thank God it’s not dead
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 shake their goddamned hand. It felt great. It felt great.
I was raised in the Midwest, which I suspect helped lead to my affection for the handshake. My father is one of those dads who says things like, “You can tell a lot about a person by how they shake hands,” and while I’m not sure that’s true (I’ve had some pretty shady characters give excellent handshakes), I appreciate the idea behind it. A handshake is a small, shared moment between two people who may not know each other well but are eager to show that they are on the same page: That they will now be able, or at least willing, to talk to each other.
That’s what a handshake is, after all: A contract. It is not binding, no matter what a character in an old Western will tell you. But it’s an agreement, a temporary one, to hear the other person out. It is two people who were separate from each other, floating around the world, coming together to figure something out. It’s a welcome…
