How Much Information *Is* TMI?

'Disclosure' can help build friendships, but it's hard to find the line between too much and too little

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

When I was working on increasing my levels of extroversion, one of the things I focused on most is finding adult friends. (Everyone seems to say it this way — “adult friends”—even though that’s both 1) vaguely sexual and 2) redundant … what other kind of friend would you want?)

I soon ran into a problem: How do you go from being acquaintances with someone to being friends? I would find that I was meeting lots of people, but I hadn’t increased my number of friends, adult or otherwise.¹*

Eventually, I learned that when it comes to friendship, time spent together is a factor, but what you do with that time also matters. How do you get beyond the dreaded vortex of small talk and into the really good, friend-making stuff?

One secret ingredient is disclosure, or revealing things about yourself to another person in an effort to get closer. In her book How to Be Yourself, the psychologist Ellen Hendriksen writes that one way to build friendships is to actually tell people what you think, do, and feel. Those infamous 36 questions that are supposed to make you fall in love weren’t actually designed to do that—they were supposed to help people get close quickly, in a lab setting, through disclosure. Asking each other things like “What is your most treasured memory?” is just more intimacy-building than asking each other how your flight was. That some people happened to fall in love by going through these questions is merely a happy accident—and shows the power of disclosure!

People with social anxiety, Hendriksen explains, often resist talking about ourselves. “We’re polite and pleasant, but others often get the impression we’re distant, formal, or otherwise keep the world at arm’s length,” she writes. To bridge this distance, she suggests you just say something about yourself—anything.

My tendency—and a lot of peoples’—is to ask questions rather than make statements about yourself. It can feel safer, in a way. But sometimes, it’s better just to divulge. It’s hard for someone to get to know you if you’re always the question-asker.

Even small talk can be pivoted toward disclosure: Instead of just remarking on the weather, say how you feel about it, or about what you like to do when the weather is like this.

Hendriksen offers this rough script:

Say hi, ask how they are, and share some tidbit about what you’re doing, what you just did, what you’re planning, or what you’ve been thinking about recently. It doesn’t have to be smart, insightful, or articulate—it just has to be about you.

Different researchers have different names for this phenomenon. Brené Brown includes “emotional exposure” in her definition of “vulnerability,” which she writes in in Daring Greatly “is about sharing our feelings and our experiences with people who have earned the right to hear them.” Other researchers have found, counterintuitively, that we tend to view people who reveal embarrassing information about themselves more positively than those who withhold information or decline to answer. “Horror stories abound of the many people who posted incriminating photographs of themselves on Facebook—half-naked at a frat party,” write the authors of that study. “We document a risk of going too far in the other direction: underdisclosure.”

Here’s where this all gets complicated, though. It can be hard to find the line between healthy disclosure and a bad case of TMI. In her book, Hendriksen describes a bridal shower at which a new acquaintance told Hendriksen that she was pregnant, and to prepare her nether regions for birth, she was soaking her thongs in vitamin E oil. “I wasn’t sure what to say to her for the rest of the shower,” Hendriksen writes. She adds that sometimes, people can’t handle your “full truth right away.”

Hendriksen was put off, but this, alas, is exactly the kind of thing I’m into: Bring your oiled perineum disclosures straight to me! It occurred to me that one woman’s gross is another woman’s fascinating, and “tell people about yourself” is a trickier commandment than it seems.

Throughout this time that I was trying to make more friends, I was going on a lot of hikes through the app Meetup. On one such hike, I met my personal disclosure jackpot: another Eastern European woman.

What do you do? Marketing, fine, whatever. Seven minutes in, she confessed that she resents her ex, especially for the time he had his mother move in with them. Then she told me a long and dark story about a friend’s stillbirth. “Eastern Europeans, we feel sad when sad things happen,” she said conclusively. “Not like Americans.”

She was probably just an exasperated single mom in need of a sounding board, but there was something so intimate about having someone’s heaviest baggage dropped on you, responding as kindly as you can, and then offloading your own baggage if you feel moved to.

She and I haven’t spoken since, but I remember enjoying that hike a lot more than some of the others I went on, where I mostly got restaurant recommendations I could easily find on Yelp or a list of beaches in Greece I’m never going to remember.

I tried to find some experts who could tell me the EXACT RIGHT LINE between disclosure and TMI. I wanted to be sure I was doing extroversion CORRECTLY. (There’s a personality trait for another post.)

But even people who study this told me they don’t really know. This is just one of those mysteries of human behavior that’s going to depend a lot on the person you’re talking to. Some people (like moi) are going to be glad to hear your darkest, deepest, wildest stuff on friend-date number one or two. I don’t find this stuff overwhelming, I find it interesting. And I find light, happy talk kind of boring. With other people, though, you will still be talking about the weather on your 17th hangout—and maybe you both like that, so that’s also fine!

I don’t know if this difference is dispositional (moody, brooding), or professional (all I do is talk to people about deep stuff), or cultural (KGB notwithstanding, Russians are notorious talkers.) But it is one of those things that appears to be super important, can’t really be quantified by science, and is just going to require a lot of real-world experimentation.

And ultimately, it’ll depend on your personal preferences, and what you need from a friend. Eastern Europeans: We feel sad when sad things happen. And we’re going to tell you about it.

1. Along the way I did get pregnant, though, which has increased my quantity of baby friends