Staring into someone else’s eyes was far rarer than people assumed. In conversation most people let their gaze hover at a socially neutral point in space, flicking around to take in body language or facial expressions, letting peripheral vision do most of the work, maybe dipping in for a brief second of eye contact to accentuate a point. Lovers occasionally transgressed this norm in moments of intimacy, but even that was unusual. Even if you did look into someone’s eyes, doing so meant shifting your focus back and forth between them.
