How much should you tell people about yourself and how soon?

This post explains how self-disclosure, when done correctly, improves relationships, but when done badly, destroys relationships.

Self-disclosure is the key to the growth and development of any relationship, and thus is a key flirting skill.

If you want to learn how to flirt, or get better at flirting, you have to learn how and when to tell people about yourself.

What is Self-Disclosure?

Let me tell you a story. Back in 2014, I was on a second date with a woman and we had gone to a bar. We get to the bar and she's already there, she's ordered a drink and I get there and she wants to order me a drink. I order something non-alcoholic. Now, I barely know this woman. I've only had one lunch date with her before, and she asks me, "Why aren't you drinking an alcoholic drink? Don't you drink alcohol?" And I explained, I don't drink alcohol.

She asked me why I didn't drink alcohol and a bunch of more personal questions. I ended up disclosing a lot about myself, which I hadn't really intended to disclose on this second date. This is an example of self-disclosure, I thought gone a little bit wrong. The intensity of the disclosure, the depth of the disclosure felt like too much, too soon to me. I felt like there wasn't enough intimacy between us to be sharing certain of these details, but it came out anyway.

I'm still in that relationship now, five years later. So I guess it didn't destroy the relationship, but in any case, it was tricky to me. I felt like it was more disclosure that I was comfortable with at the time. I think all of us face this question, how much should we tell people about ourselves and how soon after we first meet them should we tell them? What sorts of things should we disclose about ourselves?

All of this in social science goes under the general heading of self-disclosure. Self-disclosure is the term social scientists use to describe the general process of revealing facts about yourself to other people. It's an extremely important part of relationship development. In fact, lots of theorists think it's the central mechanism by which relationships develop and become more intimate.

There's a ton of research on self-disclosure in the communication literature. There are some stable findings, especially about the relationship between self-disclosure and liking. There's a strong relationship between how much we disclose to other people and how much they like us and also how much we like them. The findings taken together a little bit complicated, but I'm going to summarize them in three main points.

1. Disclosing information to people increases how much they like us.

2. We like people more after we disclose to them.

3. We disclose more to people that we already like.

Norms of Self-Disclosure

You can see that the relationship between self-disclosure and liking is complicated, but there's a sort of general trend that if we disclose more to people, it can increase the amount of liking in both directions. Therefore. self-disclosure may be a primary means by which we can increase the intimacy and depth of relationship if that's what our goal is.

Based on this, maybe we should just go up to everyone we meet and begin revealing our deepest secret fears to them, our most intimate secrets. Then soon we'll be really close, and everything will be great, but of course it doesn't work that way. Self-disclosure is a double-edged sword. Used appropriately, it deepens connection and intimacy. Used inappropriately, it drives people away. It makes them think you're abnormal. It makes them feel uncomfortable and it won't help you build relationships. It'll scare people off.

There are norms of self-disclosure or rules of self-disclosure. They're not hard and fast rules, that's why I call them norms. They are general expectations about how you should disclose how much you should disclose and about the depth and intimacy of the information you should disclose.

Relationship Duration and Self-Disclosure

The first rule is that the intensity of the disclosure should increase as the duration of the relationship increases and as the intimacy of the relationship increases. By intensity, I mean the breadth and depth and intimacy of the information that you share. So in the very beginning, you shouldn't share too much information or information that's too private and intimate and personal. As the duration of the relationship grows, you can share increasingly personal and private and intimate information and increasingly broader amounts of information about other aspects of your life.

When you adhere to this norm, you're careful about how much you disclose in the beginning. Then slowly as you get to know a person better, you disclose a little bit more, more private things, broader facts about yourself. You can violate this norm and destroy relationships and scare people off by revealing deep personal details about yourself immediately or too soon, or by saying everything about yourself too quickly.

Reciprocity and Self-Disclosure

The second main norm about self-disclosure has to do with reciprocity and self-disclosure. It's a kind of, “If you show me yours, I'll show you mine” rule, to put it crudely. It means that if I disclose something about myself, there's an expectation that you will disclose something that sort of equal depth and intimacy about yourself. This is why violating the first rule is so difficult, because if you just meet someone and tell them a deeply personal, private, intimate fact about yourself, the norm of reciprocity will demand that they share something of equal intimacy and privacy, but they just met you. There's no way they're going to feel comfortable sharing that. Therefore, they run away to avoid this norm of reciprocity.

When someone does disclose too much to us too soon, we often generate unflattering inferences about that person. First of all, that they don't understand the norms of self-disclosure. And if they don't understand those norms, what other norms of ordinary interaction do they not understand? What other norms of personal privacy are they willing to violate? Therefore they're not a safe person to interact with, and we'll try to excuse ourselves from their presence. We'll generally view them as not very socially skilled, a little bit inept and kind of clueless. If we want to strengthen and deepen our relationships, the challenge is to disclose just the right amount of just the right intensity or intimacy or privacy at just the right.

Now, these are very general rules. If you're looking for very specific guidance, it's hard to give. You have to learn these rules from observation. But generally upon first meeting, you want to tell people things like your name, where you live, where you work, what some of your kind of non-threatening non-intimate hobbies are. You don't want to talk about extremely divisive topics right away like politics or religion or sexual preference or any of your personal habits that might be taboo or really, really private. You don’t want to disclose much about your childhood and your trauma and your psychiatric problems and so on.

Look, all of us have these sorts of problems, but you don't want to hear about them upon first meeting. But as you grow more intimate with someone and you get to know them better, then slowly you begin to share more and more personal details. You do start to talk about your childhood. You do start to talk about your vulnerabilities, maybe some of your problems, traumas, addictions, mental health problems, struggles, or finances. All these things are personal and private are not to be disclosed in those first few meetings, but slowly to be disclosed as the relationship progresses and as trust develops.

You disclose these things only if the other person has demonstrated, they know how to observe the norm of reciprocity and disclosure. That is, with each increasingly slightly more private and personal disclosure, do they reciprocate with an equally private disclosure? If so, they can be trusted at least to a certain extent. Then we disclose a little bit more. We see if they reciprocate that disclosure, can they keep that information confidential and so on.

In this way, we reveal more and more about ourselves. We deepen the intimacy of the relationship. We like the other person more, they like us more. We sort of get what we want at a relationship because in most relationships, human beings, we want to be seen. We want to be known. We really want to disclose things about ourselves to other people, at least most people do.

Some of us are more private than others. But generally there's an impulse and a desire to be known and to the seen, especially by people who we care about and that we want intimate relationships with. The impulse to disclose is a natural outgrowth of this desire to be seen and to be known. For all these reasons that I've previously described, we have to disclose slowly and reciprocally.

Summary

So that's it, a brief summary of rules and norms around self-disclosure. It's an incredibly important mechanism for growing and deepening your relationships. Maybe the fundamental mechanism by which relationships grow more intimate. You've got to master it in order to develop strong relationships that are intimate. Good luck, I hope these suggestions are helpful to you.