Resolved Conflict Fosters Intimacy

Those people who I feel proud to call good friends are beyond valuable. They celebrate with you and mourn with you. Without them, we would all need more professional counseling. In fact, the Nobel prize winning economist Gary Becker claims that people are the most addictive thing on the planet. It's not just social interaction that we need, it's real in depth conversation. According to psychologist Wray Herbert, happy people have less small talk and more meaty conversations. It seems obvious that close relationships improve our lives, yet many of us don't have enough of them. It is because intimacy is scary. You have to be vulnerable and may even have to have conflict. It is that willingness to give and receive negativity that results in good relationships. This is shown in four different studies.

Study 1, participants read vignettes in which another person was experiencing a negative emotion. Participants reported they would provide more help when the person chose to express the negative emotion. In Study 2, participants watched a confederate preparing for a speech. Participants provided more help to her when she expressed nervousness. In Study 3, self-reports of willingness to express negative emotions predicted having more friends, controlling for demographic variables and extraversion. In Study 4, self-reports of willingness to express negative emotion measured prior to arrival at college predicted formation of more relationships, greater intimacy in the closest of those relationships, and greater received support from roommates across participants' first semester of college.

So go out there and be vulnerable, be honest, and make real friends.