C. What is Awkwardness?
Awkwardness is the negative feeling and fear of social rejection, and being left as lonely. It is the feeling of near-death when we think about the future prospect of certain actions of ours.
For instance, in families that have produced musicians, if one decides to become a footballer, one would feel afraid of being rejected by the family. The imagination of the family staring at the future footballer and asking him to leave home because “How come you break the family tradition?”
📖Imagine a situation where you are out for dinner with your life partner. You suddenly see your first infatuation, the girl from your school whom you cared and loved for, your first love. Your entire brain will immediately pull up all the past memories from school. (You may actually experience flashing of your past school memory and the face of the girl you loved! That’s how powerful the brain is).
Now you want to get up, hug your first love, and talk to her. But you see her with her husband, and you are with your partner. You want to absolutely talk to her, your brain is pushing you to do so, and you feel great at the prospect of talking to her again.
But even though you feel so positive about this, you will feel awkward, because your imagination will not be able to comprehend how she will react, how her husband will react, how your partner will react, and when all these reactions happen, how others in the hotel will react? Will she recognize you? Does she even remember you?
After coming back home, you will not be able to get rid of the vision of seeing your school love today. Even though you already have a partner, the very sight of your first love, the very excitement it brings in your brain and body will make you more restless. However, you will try to hide your current feelings from your partner, because in your imagination, you couldn’t resolve how your partner will react when she sees you getting up and talking to another girl.
So the feeling of awkwardness is the feeling you get when you are forced to act against your instinct and impulse due to fear of adverse social reaction and due to the fear of social rejection, and thereafter you are forced to mask your true feelings to not get into an adverse social situation, and then realizing in someone’s eyes that not everyone may be believing the way you are pretending.
Therefore awkwardness is not a binary positive or negative feeling, but rather a complex feeling that involves:
- Positive feeling about the prospect of a future action you plan to take. (Imagination resulting in positivity)
- Now when you evaluate the action from the social acceptance spectrum, and imagine the reactions of people who are in your life, you may get mixed feelings, some positive and some negative.
- So you judge an action right based on your instinct, but indecisive based on social acceptance.
- The more you try to think about social acceptance, the more your imagination runs wild, returning more and more negative feelings.
- You try to hide this negative feeling by putting up a poker face or positive face, and you feel the discomfort of pretending(which is equivalent to lying)
- You look around to find a confirmation in other’s eyes that they are not doubting you or judging you and are not detecting your confused state of feelings.
- You see questioning eyes which suggest that people are doubting the congruence of your expression.
- You still want to pursue your action, but you are unable to take action due to the never-ending imagination of people’s reactions.
For simplicity and ease of understanding, we can define awkwardness as
Awkwardness is a persistent negative feeling of social unacceptance in your imagination, for a potential future action that your instinct says right.
Awkwardness is an important feeling for survival. We can not always neglect others and do what we want to do. You may like a car that one has parked. You want to have that car. You see the keys still in the ignition. You can steal the car, but can’t due to the very awkwardness.