Please Remove Your Shoes

Something I find really interesting is how much people in this country wear shoes inside the house. In most cultures, it’s considered polite to remove your shoes when you enter another person’s home. But in our country it’s almost rude if you don’t keep them on. I don’t grok that at all. It’s too bizarre for me that we’ve gotten to this state.

I had a party recently and had people over. There is a no-shoe policy in my house. We have laminate floors and while they “Tell you” they don’t damage as easily as hardwood floors, if it’s true then hardwood floors must be super fragile. Also, I don’t know how it is with hardwood, but I’ve noticed with my laminate it tracks in ALL dirt. You can think your shoes are totally clean and walk across the floor and leave prints. Weirdly, I walk around outside without shoes quite often, and when I come in, I rarely track in dirt. For some reason, while it’s not universally true, bare feet tend to track less of anything around. You may pick up some dirt, but it’s unlikely the dirt will transfer back onto every surface (unless you were walking in mud). But shoes? Forget about it.

So part of my no-shoe policy is about not having to spend all my time mopping up after what others have tracked in. Because I HATE mopping. Another small part is about not damaging floors with scuff marks from black-soled shoes, or scratches and such from heels. That’s part of it, and a big part of it.

But another part of it is that for physical comfort you can’t beat “no shoes”. I don’t throw black tie affairs. If you’re coming into my home for a party, then it’s going to be casual. Casual, to me, means no shoes. However, I remember the first time I went to someone’s house who had a no-shoes policy. This was back during my “wear shoes everywhere” phase.

It was such a foreign thing to me that although it didn’t make me physically uncomfortable there was a level of emotional discomfort to it. When you almost never wear shoes you don’t worry about weird things like what if your feet stink, because trust me, shoes create that problem. Bare feet that are always bare pretty much never stink. But I think it’s something people who wear shoes all the time are self-conscious about. Going from wearing shoes most of the time, to wearing them very rarely I can tell you that while you may find bare feet gross, that’s only because they’ve been inside shoes. I find shoes gross. Shoes are bacteria cesspools that misshape your feet, weaken your foot muscles, and make your feet smell like a bacteria cesspool would. To me, there are few things LESS hygienic than shoes.

Also, there is the belief that if YOUR feet stink, then mine do. I assure you with the almost-never amount of my shoe wearing that that is not the case. (I think that’s one of the reasons people get weirded out when they see someone else’s bare feet. They automatically assume they will smell bad. But that’s because they wear shoes all the time and don’t understand that stinky feet is not a normal state found in nature.)

If all that weren’t bad enough, now I’m sure some people have ‘airport security’ associations anytime someone asks them to remove their shoes as if their freedoms are being taken away. (In fact, I’d almost bet that at least a few people clicking on the link to read this post thought I was going to blog about airport security, lol.) But to me, taking one’s shoes off and being ABLE to comfortably do that in a friends home is the definition of freedom. The freedom to not wear something stupid on your feet when there are unlikely to be any dangers or hazards for them to come across.

So, now I’m thinking that people need to be warned ahead of time, when I initially invite them over. I need a sign in my sun room, of course, but I think more than that, it’s polite to let people be warned of the situation ahead of time, that way they can do what THEY need to do to be comfortable. For some that might mean they want to get a pedicure because they like their toes done if they’re going to show them. For others that means socks, or the slipper socks with the little grips on the bottom, or house shoes.

I don’t care. All of those things are fine, I just don’t want outside shoes in my house, again partly for cleaning/protecting the floor reasons but then also because I want to be part of introducing the idea to others that… shoes are just plain weird and we’re happier without them in a lot of settings where it’s perfectly appropriate not to wear them. A home, whether it be mine or someone else’s SHOULD be one of those settings.

Having said that, though, I don’t routinely take my shoes off at someone else’s house (given that the polite default here is to wear shoes), UNLESS I see someone else without them. It only takes ONE person to make themselves “that comfortable”. Then all bets… and shoes… are off.