Handshakes
Dr. Dixie Dillon Lane
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Twice in my life, I have been unable to shake hands.
The first time was in 2006, when I was suffering from a terrible case of tendinitis, and even the gentlest handshake caused considerable pain. The second time, however, I was not the only one who couldn’t shake hands. That was in the year 2020, when Covid was hitting hard and we still had very little information about how the disease was transmitted or who was most at danger from those spiky Coronadevils. Generally, people didn’t shake hands at that time, for fear of exposing someone to the disease or catching it themselves. Politicians even attempted to replace handshakes with the ridiculous new greeting known as an elbow bump, making themselves look less like statesmen and more like particularly awkward disco dancers.
I missed handshakes, but it seemed reasonable to avoid them for a while in the hope of protecting the vulnerable. Unfortunately, however, a temporary pause in shaking hands was not the goal of the people in power in public health at the time. “I don’t think we should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you,” a certain Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease blithely declared that spring.
I couldn’t disagree more. Although newspaper articles at the time quoted various such notable persons saying they would be happy to see handshakes disappear permanently, shaking hands is a custom that means a great deal to a great many of us and has held profound significance in our society for millennia. Excepting the loss of life and health of so many people, perhaps nothing hurt me more during the Covid years than the loss of the handshake. I wondered: would I ever get to clasp hands in greeting with a friend or stranger again?
How is it possible to miss such a little thing so greatly?
The answer is so historical, so visceral, so emotional that it is hard to know where within the vast annals and chronicles of this ancient custom one should even begin. Thus, let me begin instead with a simple, neighborhood anecdote.
In 2020, during perhaps the worst few months the United States has known since the fall of 2001, two boys knocked on my door. They were brothers, about twelve and nine, and I had never met them before. They wanted to know if I would pay them to mow my yard. They were very polite and our grass was very long, so I said yes, and they ran back to their house a few blocks away to fetch the lawnmower.
About fifteen minutes later, the boys reappeared at my door with both their mower and their burly father in tow. I introduced myself to the latter. He introduced himself to me. And then we just stood there, not knowing what to do next.
Finally, I spoke again. “I would like to shake your hand,” I said. “But I don’t know if that’s all right with you.”
“Yes, let’s shake hands,” he replied, with apparent relief, and he stuck his hand out to grasp mine.
We both laughed and took the boys into the backyard, where I bounced my newest fussy little baby in my arms while he walked his sons around the fence-line, pointing out obstacles and areas where they would need to take special care. Then he left them to it, telling me on his way through the gate that I should let him know if his boys didn’t do a good enough job.
The boys did an excellent job.
Let’s step back and look at this situation for a moment. Here is a man who does not know me, and whom I do not know. His sons are going to be in my yard, under my supervision. They will be operating power tools. I am home alone with my small children; my husband is away at work and unable to help should problems arise.
We had to shake hands. He was leaving his children with me, a stranger! And I was trusting him to have raised those children well enough that they would not injure themselves or wreck my yard or who knows what. The most acute danger within this scenario was not of shaking hands, but of not shaking them: our handshake was, in fact, our protection.
So much is conveyed through a handshake!
In this gesture, my lawnmowers’ dad placed his open hand in mine, an ancient act symbolizing trust. By giving me his right hand — in historical terms, his sword hand — he told me he trusted me not to be his enemy, not to attack him or otherwise do him or his children harm. By looking him in the eyes as we shook, I also told him non-verbally that he could trust me, that I was not deceitful.
By giving me his right hand — in historical terms, his sword hand — he told me he trusted me not to be his enemy, not to attack him or otherwise do him or his children harm.
In exchanging names, meeting eyes, and grasping hands we reassured each other through our physical senses that we were both warm-blooded human beings, animated by honest souls. We established in an instant sufficient fellow-feeling to trust one another as neighbors.
Of course handshakes can convey other things, too.
Recall the last time you received a limp or cold handshake. Did you find your shoulders tensing and your nerves confused, and did you want to pull away? What about a handshake that crushed your fingers, or one that held on too long, making you feel controlled and vaguely endangered?
And do you not feel when you shake a child’s or elderly person’s hand gently but not weakly, that you convey your care and respect for her — would you not be ashamed to shake such a hand in any other way? Through a handshake, many things are said.
Tragically, even before 2020 our culture was beginning to lose customs such as the handshake, little rituals of word or touch or action that link strangers together in trust. We are afraid to speak to strangers, even in casual ways. Men are afraid to open a door or help a woman struggling with heavy bags in the airport, as the perceived cost of accidentally offending someone is great.
Customs of introduction have fallen almost entirely by the wayside, ensuring that acquaintanceship will almost always be tinged with awkwardness, unlikely to develop into friendship. Indeed, not only do we avoid sharing a handshake when meeting a new acquaintance, we often fail to share our own names. Or even when we do greet the adults in a group by name or with an introduction, we often ignore the children. How are children supposed to know how to address adults if we never introduce them to our acquaintances, and vice versa? Is it really so difficult to say, “John, this is my son Michael. Michael, this is Mr. Smith”? Something deep and right and formatively human occurs when Michael then extends his small hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Smith.”
Anonymity may feel safe, and sometimes it is prudent, but it can also be dangerous. Names, eye contact, and touch are what connect us across lines of unfamiliarity. Indeed, speaking a name, meeting the eyes of another person, and feeling the touch of a hand are so key to human flourishing that they are essential fixtures in some of the oldest and most long-lived religious traditions. In my own faith, it is the priest’s anointed hands that place my Lord on my tongue. Significantly, these same hands were placed by the priest within the two hands of his bishop in a medieval ritual of fealty and trust at the priest’s ordination. Or when I attend the Ukrainian Catholic church in my town, the priest calls me by name when giving me Communion, emphasizing through both the words and sensations that I both know and am known in this holiest of moments.
Similarly, when I shake a friend or stranger’s hand, it is as if she and I have broken bread together; to fight each other after this would be to betray a bond. The handshake even retains some legal standing as a contract in certain states; my father’s purchase of my childhood home, in fact, was contracted with a handshake. To break the trust established by a firm and faithful handshake is the last thing a good person would ever do. And when such a commitment is in fact broken, people will shake their heads in confusion or disgust: “But we shook on it!” one will say, bewildered. Still this happens, and so perhaps, at some level, we still understand how important a handshake is.
Nevertheless, handshakes themselves are happening less and less often in ordinary life. Discussing this with a friend the other day while our boys wrestled in the grass like puppies, as boys will do, she confirmed to me that few of her acquaintances shake hands anymore. There’s lots of saying “Hey” and half-remembering a person’s name but not venturing to risk speaking it or reintroducing oneself. A pathetic “Hi there . . . ” followed by vague and uncomfortable small talk is usually the result.
There are those who will rejoice at this lessening, this flattening of contact, this contempt of the hail-fellow-well-met. “We don’t need to shake hands. We’ve got to break that custom,” we have officiously been told — not just for a few weeks to prevent transmission, but for good. Now I am all for avoiding the spread of disease when you are sick, including by not touching hands for a while. But as a permanent alteration to society itself, as a vast cultural amputation, it is not working out very well. Was not this effort to prevent human touch a blow to our sense of togetherness, of all being one people? We were supposed to “all be in it together” through not doing ordinary things during the pandemic, but what arose instead was not a new unity but a terrible new level of division and fear. I do not propose that this is the only cause, but the correlation is unmistakable.
Let us conclude, therefore, contra the elbow-bumping powers that be, that the handshake is something we should not only resist abandoning, but deliberately embrace. Let us remember that throughout our history, alliances have been forged and wars have been ended upon this very act! As a historian living in Virginia, I have encountered some touching paintings and illustrations of Generals Grant and Lee shaking hands at Appomattox Court House (though I have yet to find one in which they elbow bump). If we let the handshake go, what will visibly reconcile enemies as friends? And what will connect strangers as neighbors?
And if we are no longer neighbors but only cohabitants of a neighborhood, who will not shake hands and do not talk over the fence, who shop on smartphones instead of in stores, who do contactless pickup of books at the local library so we don’t have to see or touch or talk to a librarian, and who do not let our children play outside (where they might meet other children) because of ubiquitous Stranger Danger, then what is to become of us? A community that never talks and never meets the eyes and never touches hands is not a real community. It is no place in which to rear children or otherwise seek to live the good life.
But we can do something about it, you and I. We can do something about it just by smiling, speaking, and teaching our children not to fear touching their fellow human beings — and by modeling that as adults by recommitting ourselves to shaking hands. Firmly.
More than fifty-three thousand veterans attended.
