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You tell your partner almost everything—painful secrets, funny stories, your office gossip. The desire to share your emotions, experiences, and private thoughts is a normal part of a thriving and healthy relationship. It defines openness, a willingness and interest in engaging in self-disclosure.
If you’re open, should your partner be open, too? Openness is an attractive quality (Sprecher and Regan, 2002), and the process of sharing and listening to each other promotes intimacy (Laurenceau, Barrett, and Pietromonaco, 1998). We may not want to know absolutely everything about our partner, but some degree of openness is important. We want our partner to want to talk to us and feel comfortable divulging feelings, fears, and hopes. Mutual disclosure is an essential thread in the fabric of a relationship, and we all bring expectations of a certain amount of disclosure to a partnership.
But people hold different implicit standards for openness in relationships, and for many, their needs are easily met. However, others find their openness expectations aren’t fulfilled by their partners, and they may struggle with frustration and disappointment when a partner isn’t as open as they want him or her to be.
Unmet openness standards can be problematic, as a new study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, explores (Thompson and Vangelisti, 2016). The researchers examined data from 205 college-aged individuals in romantic relationships to see how they viewed their partners' ability to meet their openness expectations.
As you might expect, people differ in their openness standards and how well those standards are met. Any discrepancy may induce stress—a kind of stress that individuals can respond to constructively (clarifying, reframing, seeking social support, or using humor) or destructively (punishing, exiting the relationship, self-disparagement, or distancing).
The good news, as revealed by this study, is that when people are dissatisfied with a partner’s openness, they usually talk about it with the partner (Thompson and Vangelisti, 2016). This is a pro-relationship maneuver that manages stress while showing continued investment in the partnership. Seeking social support and using humor with a partner are the next two most common ways to cope with unmet openness standards. (Self-disparagement and punishment are sometimes used, but rarely.)
The coping technique people use when they are frustrated with unfulfilled openness expectations may play a role in relationship quality (Thompson and Vangelisti, 2016). Certain coping strategies, such as punishing, exiting, or even reframing, predict worse relationship quality. These approaches seem less productive than others, such as using humor, which predict relationship satisfaction. In general, the more stress people feel about unmet openness expectations, the more they have to cope. And no coping strategy appears to fully alleviate the problem.
A few important questions remain: Where do our openness expectations come from? How do we know what is a reasonable expectation for a partner’s openness? How do we know when we're demanding too much?
Openness standards operate within a broader context of relationship expectations, which are intimately tied to our attachment orientations (i.e., whether we feel secure and safe in relationships, or whether we feel uncertain about our own worth and our partner’s trustworthiness). Reasonable expectations likely preserve a partner’s (and our own) right to keep some things private, striking a balance between sharing and discretion. A balance between independence and interdependence is often viewed as healthy, and reasonable openness expectations reflect that balance.
Keep in mind that your openness expectations can be reasonable, and yet still go unfulfilled. Partners whose default attachment orientation is avoidance may be less inclined toward openness. Uncertainty may also boost the need for a partner to share: If your partner craves more openness from you, you might try to understand any possible underlying concerns about your connection.
You should also be aware of changes in how well your openness standards are being met. When a usually trusting person has an intense desire for a partner to be more open, this may reflect a concern over deception or a seedling of doubt about a partner’s commitment. Because openness can facilitate intimacy—a fundamental component of relationships—it’s worth your time to invest in developing a stable, satisfying disclosure exchange.
References
- Laurenceau, J. P., Barrett, L. F., & Pietromonaco, P. R. (1998). Intimacy as an interpersonal process: the importance of self-disclosure, partner disclosure, and perceived partner responsiveness in interpersonal exchanges. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1238-1251.
- Sprecher, S., and Regan, P. C. (2002). Liking some things (in some people) more than others: Partner preferences in romantic relationships and friendships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 19, 463-481.
- Thompson, C. M., and Vangelisti, A. L. (2016). What happens when the standard for openness goes unmet in romantic relationships? Analyses of stress, coping, and relational consequences. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 33, 320-343.
