After I started writing this piece, I became hyperaware of the goodbyes in my life. Visiting a restaurant in Brooklyn where I used to work, I remembered that it was customary to kiss regulars on both cheeks, as some Europeans do. I’m not sure who started the ritual, but it became rude to skip it, even when I was saying farewell to someone with a cold or trying to leave at the end of a tiring shift. My husband’s father, when talking on the phone, will interrupt you mid-sentence to say, “Well, I should probably let you go now,” and then hang up. It’s jarring, but charming, and no one holds a grudge. I’m told that acquaintances hint at an impending farewell by gesturing toward the future, saying something like “So what are you up to this weekend?”
Goodbyes can be staggering in their variety, and they can’t be predicted based on how a person says hello. In the early twentieth century, on the Andaman Islands, social anthropologists observed ritualistic greetings that involved wailing and weeping. Locals took their leave from friends and family in a much more demure way: a person would lift their hand toward their mouth and blow air on it gently. Many familiar ways of saying goodbye are actually quite recent. The “hello” handshake has been around for a long time, but there are few recorded instances of a “goodbye” handshake until the fifteenth century, according to Torbjörn Lundmark, the author of “Tales of Hi and Bye: Greeting and Parting Rituals Around the World.” He notes that, as recently as the nineteen-seventies, handshakes weren’t a commonly recognizable way of saying farewell in China.
Lundmark also wrote that a farewell meal in China often includes long thin noodles, to symbolize the winding road ahead, but not cut-up pears, whose Chinese word sounds the same as the word for “separation.” A host may prolong the encounter, he added, by insisting that guests stay as long as possible—a ritual that “can reach a highly emotional pitch, ending up almost in an outright argument between host and visitor.” In England, leave-taking is similarly drawn out, the anthropologist Kate Fox writes in “Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behavior.” Just when you think that the farewell has been accomplished, one of the hosts or guests might start the process all over again.
Primates were rumored to say goodbye at least a few times before Baehren and Carvalho’s study of Chacma baboons. In the 1982 book “Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes,” the primate behaviorist Frans de Waal wrote that chimps in a sign-language experiment learned to signal “bye-bye.” A gorilla in a zoo in Arnhem, in the Netherlands, is said to have kissed zookeepers before going inside her enclosure. But Baehren and Carvalho pointed out that these behaviors, which took place rarely and in captivity, might only be imitations of human communication.
Captive chimpanzees and bonobos do make gestures and share eye contact at the beginning and end of activities that they do together. A skeptic could consider these “exit behaviors” rather than leave-taking ones, Evelina Daniela Rodrigues, a researcher at Universidade Católica Portuguesa, told me. (A human exit behavior might include checking around your table at a café, to make sure you haven’t left anything behind.) It’s also difficult to distinguish between “goodbye” and “do you want to come with me?” Rodrigues said. Baboons will show their buttocks to others before walking away; the entire troop then departs. This could be a signal to the group, instead of a leave-taking behavior. In 2022, while reviewing videos of twenty-two wild chimpanzees in Guinea, Rodrigues found very few instances when chimps ended a social interaction with a behavior that could be considered leave-taking. In addition, those behaviors were repeated in other contexts, so they might not have been goodbyes. It’s been difficult to study leave-taking, Rodrigues said, because researchers haven’t agreed on a precise definition or a way of searching for it.
