Correspondence Regarding Hug Handshake Confusion

They saw each other across the room. Both parties moved toward the other. At approximately one meter, the gesture of one party diverged from the gesture of the other. A brief realignment occurred. Contact was made. The moment passed.

Nobody mentioned it. This is now the protocol.

The hug handshake confusion is a documented consequence of re-entry after a prolonged period of disrupted contact. The disruption had been long enough to retire the old defaults without installing new ones. Nobody circulated a memo. The physical greeting had simply become a live question again after years of being a settled one, and the question resurfaced at exactly the moment when both parties were trying to focus on being glad to see each other.

The postponed wedding season of 2022 produced thousands of these interactions within a few months. Events that had been planned for spring 2020 or fall 2021, deferred across multiple revised dates, finally happened in a compressed window. The social infrastructure was reactivated at high volume all at once, which meant the greeting protocol confusion did not emerge gradually and get corrected gradually. It emerged everywhere, simultaneously, without a correction cycle.

What the correspondence documents is the secondary effect: the recovery requirement that followed the events themselves. Wanting to see people turned out not to eliminate the cost of seeing them. The two-hour dinner was fine. The drive home was also fine. But the following day had a quality that the person described to nobody as social exhaustion, because naming it felt ungrateful, because the dinner had been wanted, because the recovery need and the enjoyment of the event were supposed to be incompatible.

The recovery need was not incompatible. It simply had no official calendar entry.

The next event is in three weeks. The greeting protocol remains under internal review. Progress: sustained ambiguity.