14 bathroom etiquette rules people break all the time – but shouldn’t

It’s “unseemly” for anyone to take the phone into the bathroom, private or public, says Diane Gottsman, an etiquette expert. In a private bathroom situation, the person on the phone doesn’t want to hear you doing your business. In a public bathroom situation, the person on the phone doesn’t want to hear you and everyone else doing their business, and no one in the bathroom wants to overhear your conversation.

It’s also unseemly to invade the personal space of others in a public bathroom, Gottsman points out, and personal space boundaries are more sensitive in public bathrooms than in other venues. So, when choosing a stall or a urinal, as it were, if you’re not erring on putting the maximum possible distance between you and anyone else who is already there, you’re breaking bathroom protocol.

This applies regardless of whether the bathroom is single- or multi-stalled. In a single-stall bathroom, your hanging around is potentially keeping other people waiting in line outside the bathroom. In a multi-stall situation, your idling is potentially keeping “bathroom-shy” folks from doing their business.

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In a public bathroom scenario, if you’re making small talk with strangers, you’re doing it wrong, says Gottsman. “A simple nod of the head or a friendly ‘Hello’ is all that is necessary.”

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You might be thinking, “Don’t women always go to the bathroom together?” But the fact is, if your friend wants you to join her in the bathroom, she’ll ask. If she doesn’t ask, you can assume she wants to do her business in private. As Emily Post points out, not everyone wants a partner or an audience when they’re using the bathroom.

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If the door is locked, what do you do? Do you jiggle the door? Knock repeatedly? If so, you’re making the person inside uncomfortable, according to, well, basically everyone who’s ever been in that situation.

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The only thing more embarrassing than having an unplanned guest walk in on you doing your bathroom business is being the one inadvertently walking in on an occupied bathroom. That’s because the person who doesn’t lock the bathroom door should have known better. Since the person who walks right into that trap cannot unsee what they’ve seen, is it really fair to put them in that situation?

It would seem to go without saying that in every bathroom, at all times, you should never leave without cleaning up any mess you might have made. But it’s important enough that etiquette experts unanimously remind us to clean up after ourselves. That doesn’t just mean wiping dribbles off the seat/floor/wherever. Polite people run the water in the sink to remove any soap bubbles they’ve left behind and place their used towels in the proper receptacle.

Speaking of proper receptacles, if you’re attempting to flush things that shouldn’t be flushed, you’re violating a very basic rule of bathroom protocol. Things that shouldn’t be flushed: anything except your own “personal” waste and a reasonable amount of toilet paper – unless you’re in one of these countries where the etiquette rules are completely different.

If you find yourself in the uncomfortable position of encountering an uncooperative toilet, don’t use it. If your use of the toilet is what precipitated the problem, then the first thing you should do is to try to fix the problem, within reason. If you can’t fix it, don’t just pretend there’s not a problem, rather, report it to the appropriate person (your host, for example, if you’re at someone’s house).