Why we handshake

CNN This summer is bringing back a lot of what we used to call " normal ," including greeting long-lost friends and maskless strangers. Is the handshake back? For many of us it's long overdue. But for people still anxious about socializing after more than a year in isolation, the rituals around greeting someone can be nerve-wracking.

Do you go in for a handshake? A fist bump? An awkward little wave? A year ago, health experts seemed to declare the handshake dead. But that was back when most people knew little about the novel coronavirus and no vaccine was in sight.

So now that the pandemic is in retreat in some parts of the world, is it time to give the handshake another shot? Read More. Like many questions that have come up over the past 15 confusing months, there is no explicitly right or wrong answer. But we've learned a lot about the virus since the world first went into lockdown, so maybe it's time to revisit the question.

Why do we shake hands in the first place? Some etiquette experts suggest replacing the wordless handshake with your voice. They propose announcing verbally you are going to be extra careful and refrain from shaking hands to avoid connecting. This can be difficult to pull off when approached with someone eager to connect. How do we make the inevitable greetings less awkward? At Tero International we have always promoted that the actual hand clasp and shake were the third part of a greeting already happening.

The handshake begins with eye contact. Lock eyes with the person you are greeting. Arrange yourself shoulder to shoulder an appropriate distance apart. Being in sync with posture non-verbally communicates you are in alignment. Whether you clasp and shake or not, your eyes and posture are already communicating you are welcoming the other person in.

For the time being, once you have secured eyes and aligned your body posture, you will have to decide what comes next. There is no definitive appropriate response as one size will not fit all. The only guidance we have to follow is what we know of etiquette in general. Etiquette is not about rules, it is about respect. A widely held belief is that it originated to prove to someone that a person was offering peace and not holding a hidden weapon. But hands can be germy — coated with fecal matter and E.

On the other side is Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins University. He thinks the whole shaking controversy is overblown.

That is what hand sanitizer is for. The greeting is almost instinctual and hard to deny. But remote workers who have been holed up in makeshift kitchen and bedroom offices have been denied it for months. Meetings, birthdays, retirement parties and even funerals have been shifted onto Zoom. The loss of connections has been heartbreaking, and the resurgence of the delta variant is raising fresh questions about the return to something resembling normal.