The act of looking into someone's eyes who, in return, is looking into your eyes. Eye contact has many uses, often invovling communication. Here are some examples:

Interviews:
Good eye contact during a job interview is right up there with a firm handshake and an unfaltering smile. If you screw up in any way, the job is lost. If you figure it's pretty much lost anyway, feel free to stare at your thighs the whole time.

Presentations:
Good eye contact is also a plus for presentations if both you and the audience care about its content. In the case of many speeches, only the speaker cares about the content, and in the case of boring technical presentations, usually both the presenter(s) and the audience just want to zone out until its over.

Communication:
Sometimes you can communicate things to people simply by using your eyes. But first you must acquire eye contact with them. This can be frustrating as hell if you're trying to communicate with someone who never looks your way.

Supernatural:
Many people say they can feel eye contact.

Discipline:
See: Evil eye

Games:
See: staring contest

Flirting:
See: Templeton's how to flirt node
and the eye contact game

Lust:
See: 70 minutes of bliss
I just realized the other day that my latest fancying actually fancies me as well. This means that I'm officially in love for the first time of my life (aged 23, I am) - (you know - it's only official if it works both ways).

Unfortunately this girl lives in the other end of this cute little country, so I sort of had to put her on the train yesterday. For five minutes we were separated by the window of the train, but we didn't blink once. It was like the entire world seized existing for five minutes. I didn't even see her face. Just her eyes. They are so very very blue. And suddenly the train rolled off - taking her eyes away from me. Reviens!

A teacher of mine named Gulner actually conducted an experiment on his twin boys that relates to this subject.

When feeding his children he and his wife decided that with one child they would look intently into his eyes while talking to him during feeding. With the other son they still spoke to him while feeding him, but they made only brief eye contact and allowed their eyes to wander.

Gulner claims that to this day one son looks people straight in the eye when talking to them, and his other son's eyes tend to flit from place to place only stopping to look into your eyes directly on occasion. I have never met his children, so I can't verify his story, but next time you find yourself about to smack someone because they can't keep their gaze focused on you, remember that it might not be their fault.

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