The emotional distance between people usually affect the way we interact with each other physically. For us humans, physical distance doesn’t seem to exist when certain emotional bonds are attached. On the other hand, without this emotional bond, the person sitting next to you in the subway might as well not exist for all you care. This explains why some people can walk right by dying bodies injured from traffic accidents (this has been happening quite frequently in Taiwan, of all places, a “country” that no international community cares about, where its people doesn’t even care about their own!).
“Distance”, in our limited mental capacity to understand the world around us, only makes sense when it’s quantifiable in yards, meters or even in light years. But what about emotional distance? How does science quantify intangible ideas exist purely in the realm of concepts and cognitive matters?
It’s rather interesting to observe that when two people share a strong emotional bond, the physical distance between them seem to drastically shorten, or maybe disappear altogether. In the old days, handwritten letters can instantly fuse two distant hearts. Nowadays, those same feelings can become instant gratifications with the use telephones, emails, instant messages, or combination of all three, Skype. But still, nothing can fill in the lack of emotional bonds between two strangers.
These emotional bonds, of course, fluctuate. People fall in and out of love; the intensity of the feeling changes; this chemistry always affects the emotional distance between people. This invisible distance is particularly evident when two people quarrel. They could be under the same roof and in the same room, but they scream as if the Grand Canyon is in between them. We sometimes also use the analogy that “someone feels distant”, obviously referring to that emotional distance we somehow feel between each other as living beings.
Applying the same logic to physical distance, the lack of emotional bond can sometimes be detected when people-watching in public places. It’s obvious to see the young couples walking by with their tongues practically in each other’s throats don’t suffer a shortage of emotional distance. On the other hand, a couple can walk as close to each other as they want, but that tiny quarter-of-an-inch gap their shoulders are not touching can tell eons about their emotional distance.
Ah, all the things you can conjure up from people watching.