Human interaction has unwritten rules. Social norms loosely teach us how to conform. When we screw up, these rules feel brazenly legitimate. You’ll never forget your first go-in-for-a-hug-or-handshake-debacle. So, while it would be nice to enroll all first year college students into SOCIAL INTERACTIONS-101, we are left to our own devices to figure it all out.
I don’t think that I have ever thought about holding doors open for people as much as I do in the college campus setting. One might conclude that this small daily interaction is insignificant and produces negligible cognitive strain. Let me kindly inform you why you are wrong.
Distance and Eye Contact
There is a plethora of factors to consider before you hold open a door. First, look over your shoulder. Did you make eye contact with someone within arm’s length? In this case, you should open the door, step inside and reach back to hold it open for the tailgating pedestrian. Simple enough.
Now, eye contact is an important part of the equation as we consider different distances between you and your subject. There’s plenty of room for comfortable holding time before things get awkward. I’d say about ten feet, give or take. Now, if you exceed this magic number, you are no longer doing a good deed.
If you make the harrowing mistake of making eye contact with someone fifteen plus feet away, you must accept defeat. You have solidified your acknowledgment of them behind you, so if you let the door fall now, you’re a jerk. But now they feel pressure to duck-wattle or half-run to reach the door. You’ve expedited their pace, flustered them, and they might even trip on the way in their urgency to reach you.
Numerousness
Another scenario you might face is a large group exiting a building while you are looking to get in. Now if you decide to be a nice person and stay outside while holding the door for the whole group, you are doomed. You are never getting in that building. No one is going to stop to let you through. You have opened the flood gates. You are Moses parting the red sea and you mustn’t let your peers drown. You may receive some half-hearted ‘thank you’s’, but now you face the threat of being tardy to your class. What can I say? Nice guys evidently always finish last. You might consider this next time before you hold the door for the entire university rugby team. Did you know there’s 66 of them?!
Directionality
Another fatal error is assuming that everyone is going to the same destination as you. Consider your target’s variety in directional options. For example, if you are in a multi-floored building, you may be holding the ground level door open, only for someone to swerve you and head to the basement. You can usually get a sense of their path based on body language. If they assume the aforementioned run-walk, they are most likely headed to your door. If they give you a sympathetic smile and point down, they will not be accepting your kind gesture.
All this to say, the next time you toss and turn at night recounting the time you dropped the door in your professor’s face, or had to exclaim three slightly nuanced ‘thank you’s’ to the same door holder who is conveniently headed in your exact path, remember we’ve all been there. We’re all just busy trying to get from one place to the next.