The ironic thing is that I have worked so hard to get to that point. Maintaining eye contact is very hard for a shy, socially anxious person like me. I'm not entirely sure when I started to feel comfortable with it, but I know dancing face to face with someone in a slotted dance such as West Coast has helped me significantly to overcome the uneasiness I used to feel when looking people in the eyes.
A couple years ago, I was dancing lindy hop with an older gentleman but didn't realize he was actually dancing west coast. (The two dances are so similar that if you don't know west coast, you could easily mistake the westie for a smooth style lindy hopper.) He stared at me the whole time and had this creepy Cheshire cat grin on his face. Couldn't he look away? It so unnerved me that I didn't like dancing with him. But after that, I realized that nobody else ever looked at me while they danced with me, and it started to bug me. I felt like they were just putting up with me; they didn't really want to interact with me; they were just dancing with a faceless body. Was I ugly? Did I make them so uncomfortable that they couldn't look at my face?
Then I danced with the same man again and realized how nice it was that he paid attention to me when he danced with me. He didn't have to say anything; somehow, just maintaining eye contact made me feel like he wanted to dance with me, despite his pasted grin. After I made the transition to west coast, I found that most everyone who danced it actually made eye contact. I don't know if it was because it is a slotted/face-to-face dance rather than a circular dance, or if it was the age/maturity level of the dancers, or some other reason. But I felt a much stronger connection in west coast than lindy hop, primarily because of this eye contact.
About a month ago, after having been absent for six or nine months, I returned to Sam's to dance some lindy hop. There were a lot of new faces, and one of the guys who asked me to dance thanked me profusely for looking at him while I danced with him. "No one else does that here," he said. So it wasn't in my head! That really was the missing connection!
I still don't know if it is a good thing or bad thing that dancing with me is intense. I don't even know if the person who made that comment was talking about eye contact. For me, though, it is one of the most intense aspects about dancing with someone because it is essential in having a connection with my partner.
Addendum: "The countenance is the portrait of the soul," Cicero said, "and the eyes mark its intentions." The person who said that dancing with me was intense had a way of looking at me that felt like his eyes penetrated deep inside of me. Maybe what he saw in the portrait of my soul was indeed intense.
According to one source, the eye's limbal ring, (the black circle that separates the colored iris from the white sclera) makes people subconsciously think your eyes are prettier. When people judge a pair of faces, one with limbal rings and the other without, they strongly prefer the former even though they can't consciously detect a difference. The limbal ring, which shrinks with age, is a signal of youth and health—desirable qualities, reproductively speaking. If you look at the picture of my eyes above, you can see this so-called limbal ring... Maybe there is some truth to this looking-young thing.
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