Personal Space
In response to a post I’d seen earlier about people standing so close to them, I felt the need to express my experience with that.
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I, fairly recently, came out as asexual. Not only do I not enjoy people, strangers, touching me in general, I don’t enjoy the touch that accompanies sex. This will be more about strangers/other people touching me, in a non-sexual way. For the record, it's NEVER okay for a stranger or someone you know to touch you without your consent.
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A few weeks ago I was with my dad at Walmart. Now, I’ve come to realize that being out in public, I will have to ‘get used to’ people sort of invading my personal space. I tend to be around stores/places where there is little room to move around. I get that. But while at Walmart, my dad was checking out, at the cash register. I was about two feet away from him, waiting to check out, and there was a woman and man who came to stand behind me, waiting to check out.
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Now this woman decided it was apparently okay for her to step forward so that her breasts were touching my back. Now woman, I do not know you, I'm not intimate with you, back off. I don’t like family being that close to me, let alone a complete stranger at Walmart. When I asked her to back off, she couldn’t believe I was asking her to back off, like I was asking her to do something outrageous. I turned back around, and now my dad was done checking out. So I moved up to the cash register to get ready to pay for my items. While doing this, the woman came up again and was standing so her breasts were again at my left arm/back area. Again, I turned to the woman and asked her to move back so that I could pay for my items without her being so close (privacy and all that jazz). She again couldn’t believe that I was asking her to move back, but thankfully the man (I'm assuming it’s a boyfriend) confronted her and continuously asked her to move back away from me, a total stranger, along with the Walmart cashier who also asked the woman to move back to give me some privacy while paying and using my debit card. She did eventually move back so that I could pay with barely enough privacy. I left feeling agitated and frustrated that even while checking out, people didn’t get the idea that it’s not okay for you to be like that with other people.
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Now this rolls into my family. My family are a giant group of huggers. Always have been. Growing up, you were considered rude if you didn’t hug the whole family goodbye when leaving an event (i.e., birthdays, holidays, etc.). So I grew up used to hugging my family. I have no issues doing it now, as I was told to do it growing up.
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But I have a cousin, who is now 10 years old, who, while growing up, did NOT hug the other family members and everyone chastised my aunt and uncle about why he didn’t give people hugs. Now, personally, I believe it’s just because he’s a little prick and I am scared of the day he grows older for how horrid of a person I believe he will become, but that’s beside the point.
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People in my family didn’t get that other family members don’t have to hug you just because you think it’s rude. If my child (in the far, far, far future) doesn’t want to hug you, I'm not going to force them to hug you. If, for some reason, when asking them why they don’t want to hug you (in private, not at family functions)…. Ya know what. I had a stop in my train of thought. If my child doesn’t want to hug you, and even if they give me a crap answer, or one that I would deem invalid, that is okay. They don’t want to hug you? They don’t have to hug you.
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I'm not sure why people think that’s rude. You’re invading my personal space. You’re physically breaking that barrier I have set up for myself to feel comfortable in. I get that I need to allow people to enter that space every once in a while, but just because you’re family doesn’t mean you get to pass through that space every goddamn time you want.
Rant. Over.