One of my (many) sticking points is the fear of her rejection causing me to feel embarrassed. BUT what exactly is embarrassment, and why were we designed to feel this ?

Is it the fear of our current social status being instantly lowered ?

Your thoughts would be welcome...

It is an instinctual reaction to having your perceived value (replication) lowered. In a tribal world, there is a limited amount of women of child bearing age that would be available, anything that negatively impacts your "value" would impact your chances of mating.

However, the best way to counter this would be:

Have multiple options until you get married
acclimate yourself to rejection (it will happen a lot) and approaching
fixing your inner-game. A man that doesn't really notice or give a shit if something embarrassing happen is attractive.

I used to believe the theory that it's due to our genetic disposition to being worried about our value being lowered in a tribal situation, yet I'm no longer sure that actually makes any sense to me. There are very very few behavioral patterns or feelings that we possess in modern times that you can say are directly due to how we were thousands of years ago without there still being a true relevant correlation that caused it to develop in a person in today's world.

Personally I'm starting to think that embarrassment is learned in modern times because of modern social issues that are still entirely present. I think that embarrassment stems from humans having nearly a complete pre-occupation with sex and worrying that if they do something that makes them less desirable for some reason that they have caused that they fear they won't be able to get sex and thus the brain signals this with acute discomfort in the hopes that it will prevent similar actions in the future from risking the same thing.

Nothing that the human body does is out of malicious intent or a desire to make you less effective of a living organism. Everything is in some way an attempt to make you more successful in life. Even coughing, sneezing, bleeding, fevers, fear, sadness, anxiousness; they're all things that the body induces in order to make you better in some way...if you allow it to and don't fight against them.

Learning to realise that your whole life won't be negatively impacted by one moment, no matter how bad it may seem at the time is the start of realising that there is no need to experience negative emotions that can control your reactions. If you feel a negative emotional state that's ok, but you don't have any need to engage in it to notice that it's there and gain the value that you are truly meant to gain from that emotion. Typically allowing yourself to engage fully in an emotion means that you are willfully giving up your control over your consciousness and allowing yourself to become nothing more than a simple minded animal that is running on auto-pilot. Why else would people excuse their lack of control in certain situations based on an emotion unless it meant that they were no longer a truly sentient being? Because the court systems and all of humanity recognizes that when a person is fully overcome by an emotional state that s/he has basically no conscious thought and has become nothing more than a wild animal.

Control your mind and your emotions by allowing yourself to feel and appreciate that they exist without falling into them and you won't feel embarrassment again; of this I can assure you.

_________________
"The 'Brick Walls' are there to allow you to prove how badly you want something!" ~ Randy Pausch

~ Rye

it's "emotional perfectionism" and mind reading other people - thinking other people are judging you when they prob don't even notice you.