Personal Space : The Enigma of modern relationships

Out of the many virtues we learn in life, one of prime importance is dealing with the personal space of people around you. It is important to know as well as respect the personal space of your peers. Sometimes, we fail to estimate the personal space of a person which leads to a catastrophic collapse of understanding between the two individuals.

Enough prologue, let's understand the concept of personal space technically. First, let us define every person as an entity, and each entity has its own priority sequence for various material aspects in life, like food might be on top of someone's priority, for someone else sleep might be on top of priority list. 

An entity in center with different priorities at random length around it

Imagine the black circle as a person and the different colored ring represents different priorities. For every person, the colors of the consecutive circles will form different sequences, as well as the distance between the circles, vary making each entity unique.

Imagine you draw a curve on this map marking the "personal space" of an individual.

 Let's say yellow circle demarcates the personal space of a person, it is an unsaid etiquette that people tread carefully on the matters involving the factors inside the circle when dealing with the person in scope.

Now that we have the notations explained, let's delve deeper into why people invade the personal space of other people. 

Firstly there are people who are self-centered, and do not really care about who they are dealing with. They are of the worst accord, as they won't even know when they stick a nerve while conversing you. Staying away from that kind of people is the best way to live peacefully.

There also exist these people who care about your personal space and invade it unknowingly; they estimate the priority order wrong or, the radius of the circle denoting the personal space. This is usually case of less communication, which should be resolved. It lets both the people know each other better when they know each other's priorities and extent of personal space.

Then there exist people who do not understand the concept of personal space, they cling on to you, and give you a feeling that you are being stalked by them. If it is an honest mistake, these people should learn about personal space else they are same as the first category.

Scenario, when two entities mingle, how their personal spaces also involve with each others

There is also a type of deadlock which is hard to resolve because it is nobody's fault. I will use this graphic to explain it further.

In the figure above, you can see the fusion of two personal spaces. This is comparable to a scenario where two galaxies collide.

What exactly happens in this scenario is, two entities try to interact with each other and in the process, there is usually some overlap in each other's personal space. This can lead to a rift among two people if misinterpreted. So, there are two key things to remember in this scenario. First is that this is a natural thing to occur when you get close to someone, i.e. the distance between the entities has to decrease enough so as it reduces to something less than the sum of their personal space's radii. Secondly, in such a situation you should introspect to understand that this is not of the first kind of person dealing with you, rather if you let the person come such close, it must be someone whom you trusted with. So, the apt response in this situation is to talk it out and look for a reconciliation, because good things come out at a time further after this scenario. Sacrifices are expected from either side if you value your counterpart more you will sacrifice more. 

On an ending note, I recently found that my estimation of someone's boundaries was off by a huge value. The reason I find these type of troubles come up are due to the ways we learn to estimate, if at all you come across a new person, you will most likely face this clash or over/under estimate someone's boundaries which can wreak havoc in the long run. So, stay sharp when dealing with new people around you. If you let the guard down, you let the devil in. Fighting a demon inside you is way more difficult than fighting one on the outside.