Embarrassed? Not so much (now)
Charles Darwin described it as ‘‘the most peculiar and most human of all expressions’’. Not laughing nor crying, but the involuntary capitulation of your facial capillaries to blush.
Like acne, periods, and unrequited crushes, blushing seems to make its most torturous outings during your teenage years. God, how I remember the shame of being seen at school with a zipper flying low, a bra strap showing, or a booger up your nose. Or worse: being caught practising your signature using your big sister’s boyfriend’s surname, dotting the I’s with love hearts and crossing the T’s with cupid’s arrows.
Like tickling yourself, you can’t force yourself to blush – it just happens naturally – and once you’re blushing you can’t stop it either. When your sympathetic nervous system is overwhelmed with embarrassment it releases adrenaline that dilates your blood vessels and literally sends a rush of blood, if not to your head, then straight to your face.
We blush when we’re embarrassed, aroused, intoxicated, nervous, or simply because we’ve unexpectedly received a compliment. (Though it was me who blushed like a buffoon when, on a blind date once, I texted my best friend to tell her that ‘‘He’s sooooo hot!’’ – only to text it across the table by mistake. Beep, beep went the soundtrack to my instant shame.)
Some poor sods regularly turn red for no reason; they suffer from a syndrome known as Idiopathic craniofacial erythema. This can prove to be socially debilitating, yet blushing isn’t all bad. Psychologists say people predisposed to blushing also tend to be perceived as more trustworthy, empathetic and self-aware. Or just a bit daft, like my husband. He took his staff to the races for their company Christmas party last month, and made a right nob of himself, prematurely celebrating a trifecta win when the race still had a full lap to run. (The fact that his horses did eventually cross the finish line in first, second, and third went unnoticed: we were all still laughing too hard at him to notice.)
He blushed, but not that much, for it seems that life gets less embarrassing as we get older. I honestly can’t remember the last time my face pulled the full Charlie Brown, with red cheeks above a blazing neck.
My sister has a theory that, once you’ve had kids – once you’ve grunted and groaned for several hours in a maternity ward, with a revolving audience of relatives and complete strangers in the room – well, you simply have nothing left to feel embarrassed about. She could be right.
When I was in my late 20s, my thenboyfriend Martin, a keen surfer, took me up north to Matauri Bay for a romantic getaway. But when we got there, he handed me a wetsuit and told me he was going to teach me how to surf.
I was dead keen, for surfing has always ranked highly on my bucket list, along with other notable slacker skills such as playing the guitar, being a natural blonde and mixing the perfect mojito, but sadly it was not to be.
After I’d huffed and puffed my way into the wetsuit, then huffed and puffed my way through 100 push-ups, squats, and lunges (flexibility has never been my forte), I was hot, sweaty, and humiliated. I never even made it into the water, deciding instead to retire to our caravan with the campground cat and a good book.
But this summer, my five-year-old son started taking surfing lessons, so I went along for the ride. While Lucas was up on his feet, fist-pumping and high-fiving on his first wave, I’ve been paying a nice man with an all over tan to teach me how to wobble on a large lump of foam for a few seconds before falling off.
I haven’t managed to stand yet, though I did once pull off an improvised yoga pose – picture a downward facing dog doing the dolphin plank – before nose-diving into the whitewater. The wetsuit is also several sizes bigger, and yet it no longer seems embarrassing to make an idiot of myself in front of my nearest and dearest. It was actually jolly good fun.
Psychologists say people predisposed to blushing also tend to be perceived as more trustworthy, empathetic and selfaware. Or just a bit daft, like my husband.