By the time a difficult experience becomes a good story, we have usually already made a few alterations. We know which details to leave out and which points will probably make the other person laugh. The person who hurt us has become a character with an easily identifiable flaw. Our own behavior makes a little more sense. Whatever remains confusing can wait until we have worked out how to explain it.
There is pleasure in telling a friend a story well. But I wonder how often we postpone telling them anything until we actually can.
A friendship can grow distant while remaining perfectly amicable. We still meet for dinner. We know about the interview and the person they have started seeing. There has been no argument to explain the change, only a growing sense that the conversation requires more preparation than it once did. We arrive with updates, exchange them, and leave having fulfilled the obligation to catch up. Somehow, we still miss each other.
Keeping someone informed can look remarkably like keeping them close. Both involve talking about our lives, often in considerable detail. The difference becomes apparent in what the details allow another person to understand. A friend might know that a relationship ended without knowing how lonely we felt before it did. They might know we got the job without knowing how frightened we are of disappointing everyone who congratulated us.
The facts can be accurate while the account remains incomplete.
I am, admittedly, a chronic oversharer. Once I have something to tell someone, the thought tends to occupy an unreasonable amount of space in my mind until I have said it. Waiting until an experience has become a coherent story is hardly my natural inclination. Even so, I wonder whether getting a thought out always means allowing another person to understand it. A remarkably detailed account of an interaction can still leave its significance unexplained. How much we say and how much someone understands are not necessarily the same thing.
Research offers a useful way of thinking about that gap. In a 1998 paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers Jean-Philippe Laurenceau, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and Paula Pietromonaco examined intimacy through diaries participants completed after social interactions. In the second of their two studies, sharing emotions was a stronger predictor of intimacy than sharing facts and information. Their findings also emphasized perceived responsiveness: how the person sharing experienced the other’s response.
There is something reassuring in the idea that closeness involves more than having enough news to report. It also asks something of the listener. An admission needs somewhere to go, and a conversation can become difficult to enter if every uncertainty is met with an immediate verdict. Sometimes, we are still trying to understand a feeling when someone begins explaining why we should not have it.
Perhaps that is one reason we wait. A resolved problem is easier to discuss without inviting intervention. We can describe the bad date once we have decided there will not be another, or discuss a disappointment once we can demonstrate that it no longer bothers us. The story has acquired a conclusion, which makes it easier to share without having to negotiate what comes next.
But a friend who only hears from us after we have recovered loses the chance to accompany us through anything. They become an audience to the life we have already interpreted. Over time, even an affectionate friendship can begin to feel oddly ceremonial: we gather to announce what has changed, while much of the changing happens elsewhere.
This is not always a deliberate retreat. Sometimes, a conversation has to fit into an hour between obligations, and, unfortunately, explaining the situation would likely consume most of it. Sometimes we need privacy before we can offer honesty. There are also friends whose company is a welcome reprieve from examining ourselves. I would hate to turn every dinner into an assessment of whether we have disclosed enough.
Still, there is a difference between enjoying a light conversation and feeling that we must always be easy company. The expectation can be subtle. We apologize before mentioning that we are upset, promise to be brief, then rush toward a joke so the other person will not regret asking. We want to be known, provided the process does not inconvenience anyone.
We may occasionally misjudge that inconvenience. In a series of experiments on deeper conversation, researchers Michael Kardas, Amit Kumar, and Nicholas Epley found that strangers often cared more about one another’s disclosures than participants expected. Conversations also felt less awkward than anticipated. The research does not establish that we underestimate our friends in the same way; participants were more accurate when speaking with people close to them. It does offer a reason to question the assumption that whatever feels difficult to say must be unwelcome to hear.
Making room for a less polished conversation can begin on either side. We can tell a friend that we are still figuring something out, or ask whether they have the time to listen before attempting the explanation. As listeners, we can resist deciding what the story means before the person telling it has finished. A question can do more than a recommendation when someone is trying to find words for an experience.
And emotional intimacy need not wait for a crisis. A friendship also deepens when we share the small hope we are afraid to take seriously, or admit that something apparently ordinary has made us unexpectedly happy. Letting someone know us includes allowing them to witness the feelings that do not yet have an occasion attached.
I think this is what an exchange of updates can quietly leave behind: the opportunity to be present before there is anything definite to report. We need people who know what happened. There is a particular comfort in having someone who remembers what it was like while we did not yet know.
The next time a friend asks how we have been, perhaps we can let the answer remain unfinished for a little while. They may have been missing us, too.