[mettamage]

After having read about self-disclosure I started doing this and never looked back. Also I forgot that I had it from reading a psychology experiment.

I've learned that it mostly works. In some cases though people see you as someone who doesn't always say something relevant.

What also works (more specifically) is: you share a certain secret about you, and if that person has a similar secret you get to hear it as well. At one night, I was with a traveler and we were both in a country we both didn't live in. We self-disclosed quite a bit and then agreed to tell each other every juicy detail of our lives without ever seeing each other again. We poured our hearts out to each other and we told each other all kinds of secrets that we told no one else. I learned a lot about life that night :)

Self-disclosure is awesome. You give people the opportunity to relate back. And people, in general, are nice.

[roceasta]

Don't want to question the value of your experience but I couldn't help noticing that your example and enraged_camel's examples all take place in the context of (mild) danger and risk. Employer-employee; employee-client; travel abroad.

Could it be that shared adversity is the key to bonding? Personal revealings would then follow gradually as a natural consequence. In this view the best way to make friends would be to go to high-school together, get stuck in an airport for 2 days, watch a horror movie, share a rock-climbing accident, etc. Mostly circumstances one doesn't have much control over, admittedly!

[manyxcxi]

I think there's something to that. Most of my adult friendships with people that started in a professional setting were with people who I worked with on very stressful projects.

Lots of hours together, working very closely, gallows humor, and revealing personal details. There are about five or six people from a particularly stressful project that I talk to on no less than monthly basis, very personally catching up, and we're across 4 states and 5 cities.

[morgante]

There is definitely evidence for shared adversity being helpful for bonding, but I think it's a stretch to somehow say employment is adversity.

By that logic, pretty much every interaction we have is through shared adversity.

(It's true that I've had some amount of shared adversity with all my close friends though.)

[accountyaccount]

The state of being can be considered shared adversity.

[supercoder]

Yeah some of my best friends are the ones who I've focred to go with me to an airport for 2 days. Not sure if they can say the same though