In interpersonal communication, eye contact needs a balance. Too much and people are creepy. Too little and people are shady. Most people learn eye contact by interacting with others, but like most social skills, that can vary depending on who you are learning them from, your own predilictions, and social norms for your community.

OK, I don't feel so bad now about my poor eye-contact-making skills. When I want to, I can force myself to make eye contact from time to time.

Once I had a date with a woman who not only never made eye contact with me, she was always looking way off to the side. It bugged me, maybe because it was an exaggerated version of my eye contact difficulties?

I don't want to turn this conversation, which has been about someone else and her needs, into one that's all memememe.

I didn't take it as that at all. I'm genuinely interested in the topic.

I don't force eye contact and whether or not I use it is totally mood based.

Dictionary.com tells me that the difference between empathy and sympathy is:

Both empathy and sympathy are feelings concerning other people. Sympathy is literally 'feeling with' - compassion for or commiseration with another person. Empathy, by contrast, is literally 'feeling into' - the ability to project one's personality into another person and more fully understand that person. Sympathy derives from Latin and Greek words meaning 'having a fellow feeling'. The term empathy originated in psychology (translation of a German term, c. 1903) and has now come to mean the ability to imagine or project oneself into another person's position and experience all the sensations involved in that position. You feel empathy when you've "been there", and sympathy when you haven't.

Hm.

edited to fix fumbled formatting

Why am I reading primal signals of aggression as come ons?

I think extended eye contact is a standard form of flirting.

Why am I reading primal signals of aggression as come ons?

Well, it's context-specific, I guess. Personally, I don't like it even when it's in the context of a romantic interlude with a partner.

When I first moved to Chicago, I could always tell the streetwalkers in my neighborhood because they would immediately make and hold eye contact with me.

Well, it's context-specific, I guess.

My context-o-meter is broken, because I've never read it as aggression. Every time someone looks at me too long I think they're a creeper in the bad touch way.

*However* I probably make and maintain more eye contact than, say, Steph is comfortable with, when I'm in a solid and alpha mood. Especially in a public speaking/meeting context, it's my do-my-bidding hear-my-words gesture, and I'm always making eye contact with someone, if there are more than three people in the room and I'm talking.

Business one on ones? I spend most of the time on the person's face, and 50% of that on their eyes. WHILE TALKING IS HAPPENING. It's only while not talking that I start to get the bad feelings.

Also, dunno if this applies to lesbians, but one way to tell if a man is probably gay (and you're a man) is make and hold eye contact with him - a straight man will generally look away pretty quickly, but a gay man will hold eye contact with you.

I find eye contact the way it's described in fiction to be very confusing because it's always in the plural ("gazed into her eyes") when really, you can only focus on one eye at a time unless you're pretty far away.

Ha! I've never been able to gaze into more than one eye. I always assumed that was because only one of mine actually works at any given time.