Two Types of Gazes
The way you look at me, the way I look at you
It was a very nice hotel we were meeting in.
The “lobby,” for example, was not merely a large room surrounding a check-in stand. Exactly the opposite: a maze of intimate meeting spots. Tiny tables nestled against artsy wallpaper, thick walls carved out for special benches, a nook-filled cave of modern chairs and nice upholstery. A waiter took my coffee order, and by the time he returned, my name was memorized.
“Can I get you any cream or sugar, Tolly?” he asked. Even the sugar cubes were bougie, brown lumps charmingly uneven. I imagined a monk in the back chipping off pieces just for me.
“This place is always winning awards,” my boss remarked, and I could see why, everything low-lit and elegant. They let you simply walk in and work?, I marveled. I’m always talking shit about the gentrification of Austin, but even I get seduced by surfaces.
Our meeting guests arrived, and we relocated to a brightly lit dining room, where we assumed our conversational posts. Work meetings are like dates sometimes. Eye contact is made, small talk deployed, energy continuously assessed. What do you want? What do I want?
Everything is subtext until someone announces their real intentions, and the ones who do it best make it seem like everyone’s intentions.
I have to modulate myself in situations like these. Fifteen years in aerial dance – my ongoing lark – taught me to perform. To convey something on my face that is different from what I actually feel. I’ve never been a good actor, but I’m a decent performer, and work requires conversational choreography. When to gaze directly at someone with a steady aim, containing and training my attention so as to read them. Or more precisely: so that they feel read.
But if too directional and unchanging, my gaze becomes aggressive. So I pull it back, soften the eye contact. Let my energy diffuse from a laser beam to a lantern. I try then to feel for whatever it is the other person wants from this interaction, and capitalism would have you think it’s money. But on a moment-to-moment level, most people want tension and release. That could be a “yes, send me a proposal” or even “yes, here’s funding.” At the worst, which is not all that bad, it’s “yes, let’s continue the conversation over email.” None of us want to leave our meetings lacking resolution.
Before I opened a tab to write this essay, I opened an email from last week’s meeting partners.
They requested a proposal for my idea, the one I’d floated in that pretty dining room, where the server knew all of our names.
Two types of gazes
The hidden forces of human connection always fascinate me, and Instagram has figured this out. My Explore page is a wall of attachment styles and shame explainers, relationship models and protection mechanisms, the odd heels dancer or Heated Rivalry fan service. Welcome to my brain.
For months, IG’s been pushing Kasia Urbaniak on me, a self-styled power practitioner. What is that, you might ask. Well, Kasia’s bio states she is a former Taoist nun turned New York dominatrix. I don’t know if these things are true, but I respect a cool origin story, even if pieces are potentially stretched or even fictionalized. Former English major reporting for duty.
Kasia hooked me months back with a series on gazes: the penetrating gaze and the receiving gaze. Is there science on this? Some. I tried to find reviews, rather than single studies, but the review linked here is almost 20 years old. Something tells me that if we’re cutting USAID we’re probably not funding gaze research. Still: they’re interesting concepts to play with, and her series inspired me to consider my own gaze more carefully. What am I communicating with mine? Which one do I favor? On that question, I had a hunch.
Penetrating gaze
The penetrating gaze is focused and direct, a scope trained on its target. This is the gaze we use to reach inside another person and seize something essential. In this way, penetrating gaze can make others feel seen. It can also make them feel dominated. We use it to deflect doubt, to sit someone down, to be taken seriously.
This is the gaze I use most often in work meetings. I know this because I’ve had to train myself how. Penetrating gaze does not come naturally to me. Up to this point, my jobs have allowed me to hole up in my house, clacking away at my keyboard and pausing only to put on a collared shirt for Zooms. My current job, however, is highly relational, very in-person. On any given day, you can find me values-aligning, finding a win-win, saying the kinds of things you do in the dance of transaction. Which comes with its own mannered language.
Despite the corporate-ese, I like my job a lot, precisely because I get to do this dance. Discover the other parties’ motivations, and see if I can come up with something to suit them. And by extension, myself.
But because I was an at-home gremlin for so many years, then had to larp as a polished person, my professional energy changed. So did my gaze. I did want to be taken seriously, so I started looking at people in a more deliberate way. Let conversational tension hang in the air. Before, I’d rush to snuff that stuff out with a joke. Now, I allowed it. It always was so instinctive for me to come off as harmless. No pressure! But I learned that pressure is a tool, that some people want to be told what to do. To be given direction. I’m not a naturally dominant person, but I discovered this energy can be a form of altruism. Some people want to follow, and that made me want to lead.
None of this was super conscious, by the way. If anything, meeting people who were so much better at this than me – focusing all their way to a goal – became a way to grow beyond my own social instincts. Listening, relating, giggling: this, I already knew how to do. Directing the energy: much more novel. People with good penetrating gaze became my mentors, and I enjoyed spending time with them partially because they were so exotic.
But it’s important to know there are degrees of penetrating gaze, because it can also feel threatening: an “I see you, motherfucker” type quality. This more intense version is used to ferret out, expose.
Times I’ve walked alone on a city street and felt someone behind me: I wheel around and shoot this gaze like an accusation.
A penetrating gaze also exerts itself in conflict. Think about the last fight you had, the way you felt cornered by your sparring partner. Darts coming out of their eyeballs. I once dated someone conflict-prone, and when they were mad at me, their eyes became snipers, always trying to catch me in a lie. “There’s nothing here, I promise!” I wanted to say, hands held up in surrender. Their gaze felt like entry without a search warrant. Certain of my wrongdoing, they looked at me with those eyes, waiting for me to confess guilt. Which worked quite well on me.
But again: degrees. With the right intention, penetrating gaze can relax your audience. It establishes certainty, an “I’m in charge” vibe that makes others want to be on their best behavior. Think good public speakers, the ones who don’t have to sheepishly say “I’ll wait” until someone else shushes the room, coming to their rescue. Kasia uses the example of Michelle Obama, who I doubt has ever had say “I’ll wait” in her public life.
Even when she’s smiling, Michelle’s gaze has a boss-like quality to it. I rarely say the words “yes ma’am,” but with Michelle? Of course.
So penetrating gaze isn’t inherently good or bad — just directional. It says, “I’m looking for what’s true or vulnerable,” which can feel very clarifying to the recipient.
The power of penetrating gaze is that it reduces ambiguity. It narrows the focus visually, as well as psychologically. When receiving this gaze, you are the object of their attention. You are very specifically being chosen.
Despite our natural tendencies, we all have the ability to deploy penetrating gaze. The key is intent. And often we are being given penetrating gaze, and don’t consciously realize it until our body provides certain clues. Which can also be helpful in social situations, to be aware of the energy in the room.
When is someone giving you penetrating gaze? Common tells:
When they speak to you, you feel like you’re the only person in the room
You find yourself agreeing with them almost intuitively
You feel slightly intimidated, but also slightly excited
The strange sensation they know something about you that you don’t
It feels like you’re being tracked: prey being toyed with by a predator
You feel exposed; “did I accidentally share a secret?”
You feel relaxed: “this person knows what they’re talking about, I trust them”
You feel an erotic power differential. “They’re leading, I’m following”
Receiving gaze
On the flip side of it all, we have receiving gaze: the warm meadow of eye contact.
This is the gaze you can stretch out inside of, because here, you can be totally yourself, totally accepted. You have room to take up space, tell your life story, even stumble while you make your point. It’s ok, sweetheart. I got you.
Receiving gaze is spacious but still attuned, and it often feels deeply caring. That’s because it softens social tension and signals a willingness to connect. This gaze helps someone feel invited, not indicted.
As soon as Kasia described receiving gaze, I felt a pang of recognition: this is me. My tendency to a fault.
Unless I’m processing something aloud to a friend (or at a work meeting), I overwhelmingly prefer being a listener than an informer. I imagine it feels nice on the other side. And of course, I’ve often wondered how gendered this is. Girls and women are raised to be the emotional custodians of the world: my mom was her father’s listener, the one he poured out his problems to even when she was a small child. She learned this skill early, and passed it onto me. I watched how she listened to others, her mirrored nods, her sympathetic smiles. She’d been giving those out since her father’s fishing boat.
Like penetrating gaze, receiving gaze isn’t inherently good or bad. Where penetrating gaze is directional, receiving gaze is wide open. It settles the other person’s social anxiety, saying: “I’m here, I’m taking you in.” It creates room for people to slowly reveal themselves. If penetrating gaze inspires trust, receiving gaze suggests trust. “I believe you,” spelled out in big doe eyes.
More than once, I’ve had people tell me I feel like their best friend. Or, that I know them better than their declared best friends. After a handful of conversations we’ve had together, this feeling sometimes bubbles up. I’m not their emergency contact, not on their child’s pick-up list, not woven into their existing social fabric at all, but what they’re picking up on, I think, is emotional intimacy – which I love – and receiving gaze is a conduit of that. The sense that you could tell this person (me) all of your secrets.
I pride myself on being curious, and genuinely enjoy it when someone feels my interest. But I’ve also come to realize there’s a dark side to this instinct: very leaky boundaries.
When you’re curious about everyone, you so easily wander away from your core. I’ve had to learn (am still learning) to self-author my life, and not get carried by others’ momentum. Receiving gaze has a radical acceptance quality, and that is indeed the energy with which I try to meet the world. But it’s OK to think about what you want and then go do that, rather than having everyone else set the interactive agenda for you.
It’s also OK, even advisable, to shore up interest in strangers, and save my curiosity for those who’ve actually earned it. This tendency is probably instinctual politeness anyway, which I am fucking ready to question and compost. I’d so much rather connect than charm. Being too good at the latter just hollows me out, makes me constantly forget who I am and what I’m all about.
Used too freely (raises hand), receiving gaze can also feel vague. Not specific. Unfocused, even vacant.
Penetrating gaze has extremes, and so does receiving gaze. A networking environment, when someone halfheartedly chats with you: their aperture so big, you wonder if they’re taking in the whole room for someone more important. “So tell me what you do…yeah…cool…uh huh…” – this type. You feel less like a person, more like a prop. The thing they address until the real object of interest crosses their sight line.
Receiving can also make you seem passive, bereft of clear intentions. I’ve known people with fake receiving gaze, accompanied by empty social gestures. These are the folks who toss out questions for answers they aren’t really interested in, just filling the air with words because silence is uncomfortable for them. My #1 turnoff.
Ideally, receiving gaze feels invitational because it actually is.
You’re being drawn into a genuine field of curiosity and care, because the person giving it to you wants to hear your story. Receiving the healthy version of this gaze feels more subtle than receiving penetrating gaze, because you are the subject of the interaction. They hold the space while you expand into it.
When is someone giving you receiving gaze? Common tells:
They ask “so tell me what’s been going on?” and lean forward while you answer
The energy between you is quietly intimate, emotionally safe
You feel seen without feeling pressured – you can be your real self here
You walk away feeling more whole
You say things like “God, you could be my therapist!”
They actually are your therapist
Your body relaxes when they look at you
Conversations with them feel calming, even if you don’t exactly know why
We are all wired to be more external or internal with our focus, to assert ourselves or take others in.
And while you can use both gazes to achieve the social effects you want, the point is not theater, but intentionality. What do you want at any given time, in any given interaction, with any given person?
Hopefully our social dynamics don’t feel like calculus, but gaze is something within our control. And when we have more self-awareness around it, we start to understand which gaze we’re more prone to. And, how to pick up the other as needed.
*
I left the hotel last week, hooking my finger in my keys as I walked to the parking garage. I heard footsteps behind me — it was the server from the dining room, running after me on the sidewalk.
“Hey, is this your charger?” she asked. It was. It must have fallen out of my laptop bag.
“Thank you so much,” I told her, and I meant it. MacBook chargers are so stupidly expensive, the kind of thing I loathe replacing. Thank God she caught me.
“It’s ok, I’m literally always leaving things places,” she said, quickly adding: “have everything?”
I checked my stuff: all good. She nodded and walked away, but not before smiling, not before raising the inside corners of her eyebrows, not before making sure I was ok and actually I did feel more ok, watching her go.
What kind of gaze do you think you tend to use more often? Also: thanks for reading Sumit Here! I promise I won’t go this long between posts next time. :)
Loved this on gazes. It's an underrated part of interaction. Giving full attention is a great gift-gaze to give someone.
Love this. I feel like I have both gazes and many more. Missed your writing and I’m glad you’re back 🙂