We should take awkwardness less personally, and more seriously | Aeon Essays

When a situation requires us to push a point that makes others uncomfortable, it challenges scripts that cast women as emotional “givers”; departing from this script, we may feel awkward, or bad for making others feel awkward.

That people vary in their proneness—or lack thereof—to awkwardness shows that our facility with social scripts and the extent to which we care about them can come apart.

That’s a trade-off we often make—opting to “play along” rather than make things awkward.

Awkwardness is essentially social: it emerges when the scripts we rely on to guide our social interactions fail us, either because they don’t exist or we’re unable to access or implement them.

If feeling awkward is the cost of social change, it should be borne by those with social advantage