Have you met anyone who intentionally invades your personal space? You’re at a party and they completely ignore the respectful 3-feet of space rule between them and you. They lean in completely shattering that socially acceptable comfort zone to the point you can feel their hot breath on your face and know exactly what they had for lunch. UCK! It does not feel good to have your personal space invaded, unless you ask someone in. So what’s up with people who think it is absolutely okay to tailgate?
We’re not inviting anyone to ride our car’s butt. It’s not polite, or safe, to just invade our space
like that. It’s polite to think of driving like one big party but we’re all in cars. But driving is much more dangerous than the office Christmas Party. There is a socially acceptable zone around our car just as there is one around us. So tailgating is forcing ourselves on unwilling victims.
I don’t think anyone likes having people they don’t know get upset with the dangerous, discourteous and disrespectful behavior. I suspect tailgating is a result of our not actually stopping to think about the reasons why it is absolutely NOT OKAY to get too close to the car in front of us. Tailgating is unsafe because we cannot stop nearly as fast as we think. Tailgating is not respecting safety, or someone’s personal space and is see as our being a pushy pain in the butt. No, when we tailgate we’re just focused on getting to where we want to go as fast as possible. Speed limit, safety, respect, courtesy be damned.
Okay, so we can cling to some car’s bumper like a sweat drenched t-shirt in a hot body contest. But just know tailgating does not get us to where we’re going any faster. There are cars in front remember? And all of those people in those cars in front of us aren’t just wishing we’d kindly back off. They’re sending out some big, juicy– get with the program jerk – kind of vibe. So let’s snap out of it and back off. Let’s have some patience and respect for other people and stop being such a huge pain in their butt.
