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Weird relatives, maladjusted co-workers, endless small talk: Holiday parties are fertile ground for awkward interactions that make you want to pluck out your brain and toss it in the artichoke dip. This time of year, as we mix and mingle with people of varying social abilities—and share bathrooms with in-laws of varying gastrointestinal stability—moments are bound to arise that challenge our sense of ease.
Awkwardness is an inevitable part of human existence, says Alexandra Plakias, a philosophy professor at Hamilton College and the author of the 2024 book Awkwardness: A Theory. But it doesn’t have to be debilitating. Sometimes, it can even be useful. In the thick of what may be the most awkward season of the year, Plakias and I chatted about how to plan for holiday mishaps, why certain situations make us want to die, and what awkwardness tells us about social capital. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Christina Cauterucci: You’re the expert on awkwardness. I feel like holiday parties, especially with extended families or colleagues [my perfect Slate ones excluded], can be some of the most awkward places on the planet. Would you agree?
Alexandra Plakias: It’s the perfect storm of awkwardness. You have food, you have alcohol, you have questions about what to wear, you have people you don’t see very often, or who you see very often but not in this context. There’s also a lot of pressure on the holidays in general. We have a lot of expectations that don’t always align—like we want it to be a lot of different things, and maybe it can’t be all of those things. Those kinds of situations are especially prone to awkwardness.
Also, I’ve watched too many Christmas movies where the holiday parties are glitzy and romantic and magical. That’s just not how an office party or a family party tends to be.
There’s this idea that you’re going to put on a dress and some red lipstick and drink a glass of Champagne, and magically, you and your colleagues will all be transformed into these really fun, glamorous people. If that’s the script that you’re going into a holiday party with, you are definitely bound to be disappointed.
Backing up a bit—how do you define awkwardness?
Awkwardness is something that happens in social interactions when we lack a script for that interaction, or when we have a script, but it just isn’t working. We all walk around with these cognitive maps in our head for social interactions: We have our eating in a restaurant script; we have our making a doctor’s appointment script. It’s not necessarily a set of literal lines that we’re going to say, although sometimes it is. I read a lot of advice columns, and one thing I noticed is that people are often like, “Oh, I need to have this really hard conversation. Can you give me a script?”
We walk around with these scripts in our head, and most of the time we don’t even notice them, because they’re just operating normally. But once in a while, they fail us. Or we perform our part, and someone throws us for a loop. When that happens, and we’re suddenly left not knowing where we stand, what to do, what’s happening—that’s when things can get really awkward. We coexist with other people in the world pretty well, most of the time. If there is a positive aspect to awkwardness, it’s that, Oh, yeah, I actually care about other people, and I care how other people are responding to me.
That’s part of the deep human truth of awkwardness. We are very attuned to people most of the time, and when we’re not, we experience it as painful.
One of the things that can feel so awkward about holiday parties, when you’re socializing with people you might not know super well, is small talk. Is it awkward for everyone? Or just some of us?
I think some people feel happy and at ease doing small talk, but for a lot of people, it is pretty terrible. We tend to think of small talk as a bad thing. Maybe that’s partly a cultural thing, like we want to have these deeper conversations with people. But I think small talk is fine, actually.
One thing I’ve come to appreciate is that sometimes, it’s not actually the thing you’re talking about that’s the important thing. It’s just the act of having a conversation with someone. That’s one function that small talk plays: Let’s have a really low-stakes thing so that we can stand, face one another, exchange some words, and just act like two humans at a party.
One thing that I think about probably way too often for my own good is this study I read where they had strangers talk to each other for any length of time. Then, the participants reported when they’d wanted the conversations to end—and in half the conversations, both people said they’d wanted it to end sooner than it did. That haunts me! Why can it feel so awkward to end a conversation? Is it because we don’t want to hurt people’s feelings?
I think it’s partly that we don’t want to seem like we’re trying to get out of the conversation. Uncertainty is a big factor here. So you’re standing there wondering, Does this person wish this conversation was already over? But that’s certainly not something you can ask someone without making it really awkward.
And when we start self-monitoring, things can get awkward because it takes us out of the normal flow of social interaction. This happens to me sometimes, because I’m very distractible. So at a cocktail party, if there are lots of side conversations happening in my peripheral hearing, I’m like, Do I seem distracted? Can the person tell that I’m distracted? What did they just say? And as you’re maintaining that second stream of consciousness, of self-monitoring, things are becoming awkward because you’re no longer immersed in the interaction you’re having. You’re trying to do two things at once.
Then there’s the awkward remarks. Like when someone asks why you’re not eating the cookies they brought—are you trying to lose weight? Or someone makes a political comment that makes everyone else want to die. Is there any way around the awkwardness there?
Food can be especially awkward because it’s so fraught. We want food to symbolize all these different things, and people are coming at food with all kinds of different values and assumptions and beliefs. We want people to enjoy food, even as we have our own conflicted attitudes about it.
An awkward remark is also a place where we can see the power of awkwardness, because the remark will happen, and then you have two choices: You can either smooth it over and make it OK for everyone, or you can let it hang there and get really, really awkward.
Some people feel responsible for the comfort of everyone in the group and will step in and smooth things over and take on that kind of work. And it’s sometimes seen as certain people’s jobs to do that kind of smoothing over. I’m thinking here, especially, of women, who are often perceived as responsible for emotional labor within groups and workplaces and families.
So there is this kind of pressure to step in and make it OK for everyone. But notice that you can also not do that. You can just let it get awkward if someone makes a political remark that’s really disparaging of a certain group. You can just let that hang out there and hope that the awkwardness serves to draw people’s attention to the fact that other people are not OK with that. That’s hard, and I often think that being able to tolerate other people’s discomfort is a kind of superpower.
What is it about awkwardness that can feel so one-sided, like one person feels awkward and the other one feels totally fine? When you talk about these social scripts that we’re all trying to follow—is it just that we all have different ideas of what they should be?
I think it’s more that we have different ideas about who is responsible when those scripts don’t go according to plan. Some people tend to take that responsibility onto themselves and feel like, Oh my god, I can’t believe I did that; I said that; I didn’t do that; I didn’t say that. And other people just think, Man, that person is no fun. One reason why we have these different responses is that some people just don’t see others’ discomfort as their problem. There was just this Onion article that was like, “When did everyone get so uptight? I’m just here trying to be a total asshole!” Only some people are made uncomfortable by other people’s discomfort.
Some of us also tend to blame ourselves when things don’t go smoothly socially. One of the points I make in my book is that awkwardness is the product of social interactions. It’s not something that we are as individuals. So if an interaction goes badly and gets awkward, sometimes it’s helpful to think, Well, that other person could have thrown me a lifeline there, and they didn’t! We could see it not as just our responsibility, but as a collective failing.
Another category of awkward holiday moment involves staying at people’s houses while visiting—being in more intimate spaces with loved ones than you usually would. There’s this nightmare situation we always talk about in my family where someone clogged a toilet at an in-law’s party and had to ask for help to deal with the aftermath. Is the awkwardness that comes with a crisis like that just an unavoidable part of being human? There’s no real planning ahead you can do for that, or social scripts that can solve for it, right?
It’s really funny that you mention that example, because I came across this survey that asked people what their most awkward hypothetical situations were. The No. 3 was clogging a toilet, right behind watching a sex scene with a parent. So when you said that, I was like, this is empirically true! This is proven.
So, yeah, to be human is to be awkward. I’ve only encountered a few people, thankfully, since writing this book that were like, “I just don’t feel awkwardness.” And those are the people who scare me a little bit, and who I also suspect make everyone around them feel very awkward. But it’s really interesting and important to distinguish embarrassment and awkwardness, because we often get them confused, along with shame.
Shame and embarrassment are things you feel when you have done something that you feel bad about, like as an individual. They’re self-directed emotions that come out after the fact. Awkwardness arises out of a social interaction. Like, “Now you know me as someone who has clogged your toilet, and we must continue to interact. I am both your boss and the person who clogged your toilet, and now it’s going to be weird.”
We often feel ashamed of our awkward moments because we see them as failures on our part, which I think is a mistake. But distinguishing those feelings can also be helpful in thinking about how to move forward. If the problem is awkwardness, then maybe we just need to smooth it out, have a conversation about it, and get past it. Something like, “Next year, let’s put something explicit on the invitation about please no heavy making out at the office party.” But if it’s embarrassment or shame, then you’re feeling bad about a choice that you made, and maybe you need to make different choices going forward.
Awkwardness often seems kind of funny and trivial, but it can be really hurtful for the person who feels like they’re being ostracized as the awkward one, the outsider. It intersects in really interesting ways with ideas about who has social capital, who has the power in an interaction. For a lot of us, we’re so focused on ourselves and whether we’re feeling awkward that it sometimes takes us out of noticing what other people might need or want from us, and makes us less attentive to the kinds of social cues that are unfolding around us. So if you’re the boss at a holiday party, maybe try to notice what you can do to put other people at ease.
Is there any sort of salutary quality to awkward situations? Or is it all just something to get over?
I think collectively, we can benefit from awkwardness—from noticing where it happens and understanding it as a symptom of a failed set of social resources. We have these these norms by which we navigate our social interactions, and sometimes they just stop working for us or aren’t meeting our current needs. Awkwardness can draw our attention to areas where we could be more transparent: Maybe be a little more clear about what the holiday party dress code is, what kind of event it is.
Awkwardness also brings out something that we try not to acknowledge very often, which is that socializing is work. We want socializing to seem effortless, and we talk about people being try-hards. But you wouldn’t go out on a big hike without a map and some snacks and some water. I think it’s OK to spend a little time before a work holiday party thinking about: What kind of small talk am I going to make? What’s my plan for if I get stuck in a conversation with someone and I really want to get out of it? I don’t think it means that we are failing in any way.
What don’t people understand about awkwardness that you wish they would?
When people experience awkwardness, they often see it as a personal failing. It might be helpful instead to reframe it as a kind of social inevitability. We have these incredibly complex, conflicting norms around socializing, some of which are inherited from hundreds of years ago and don’t reflect our current social realities.
To that end, if you’re going to a holiday event or staying at someone’s house, it can be helpful not just to make a plan, but also to think about how you see your role in a situation. Awkwardness often happens when we’re trying to occupy multiple roles that aren’t fully compatible. So we’re trying to be a good daughter, but also a politically and socially aware person, but we’re trying not to hurt anyone’s feelings. Thinking about which role you’re going to occupy in this interaction—and which one is most important to you—can help you navigate any awkwardness and move according to your values.
It’s also helpful to think about what the alternatives to awkwardness are. Talking politics at the holiday table might get awkward, but is awkwardness the worst outcome? What if, instead of awkward, people get really angry? Is that better or worse? I’m not saying one way or the other, but it is something to think about. Awkwardness is a kind of suspended social animation, and what replaces it might not necessarily be an improvement.
