Essay On Self Disclosure

In my opinion, there is a positive relationship between self-disclosure and intimacy and level of self-disclosure will increase gradually according to degree of intimacy between two people. At the stage of strangers, self-disclosure of information or facts, such as your interests, hobbies or secondary school you attended, help creating first impression of a person based on physical proximity, similarity and familiarity. Once both sides become friends, on one hand, self-disclosure of information help both sides to explore the personality of the other side; on the other hand, self-disclosure of thoughts or feeling also helps in building up intimacy between two persons since the level of privacy between information and thoughts or feeling is different.

Intimacy of a relationship will only be increased as long as there is a two-sided interaction of self-disclosure. If one side failed to response to self-disclosure of the other side, the development of relationship will be stuck and fail to progress any further. On the other hand, the level of self-disclosure will also affect development of relationship. For example, the sharing of your sadness will be more helpful in developing relationship than sharing of what tv programme you like as the level of depth of the sharing is different. The sharing of your sadness is a sign of seeking help from your partner. The positive feeling of being needed by you will reinforce your partner to keep on this relationship and share their feelings with you as a return, which helps making progress in the development of relationship. As researchers found out that intimacy is a combination of self-disclosure and partner’s disclosure. If one side is willing to self-disclose and response to self-disclosure of the other side, intimacy will be experienced by both sides. Also, the research showed that self-disclosure of emotions makes a better prediction of intimacy than disclosure of facts or information (Laurenceau, Barrett & Pietromonaco,