Awkwardness: A Theory

reducing awkwardness needn’t require changing expressive styles; it might be enough to broaden our interpretive resources.

As we’ve seen, scripts don’t just tell us what others expect, or what a situation demands: they help us classify and judge events, as well as our own emotions and reactions. If we don’t know what we think about an issue, we’re susceptible to awkwardness when called to react.

Rather than thinking of owning awkwardness as something we do as individuals, we might think of it as a way of collectively redistributing social capital. Awkward moments are an opportunity for social inclusion, a way to acknowledge the difficulty surrounding certain topics and share the burden of navigating them. Owning awkwardness is one way to d

Phenomenologically, the experience of cringing involves a self-deprecating withdrawal, a visceral curling in on oneself, a feeling in the pit of one’s stomach that’s not quite painful, but more than a knot. Cringing is more transient and weaker than self-loathing; harsher than laughing at oneself. We cringe when we’re embarrassed and we cringe when

Shame around certain topics—like sex, or addiction—makes us shy away from discussing them. This in turn prevents us from acquiring social scripts with which to navigate them.

while we typically aren’t aware of “choosing” a script to apply to a situation—part of what makes scripts so useful is the effortlessness with which they’re typically activated—we sometimes have options about how to classify actors and events.

the puzzle is less about how things become awkward than about how things are ever not awkward. Our reliance on infrastructure is most evident when that infrastructure fails.

We depend on others to receive our expressions and grant them meaning. This leaves us vulnerable to misinterpretation.

Watching others’ assertions fail to get uptake also has a silencing effect on potential future speakers.