I previously discussed how to meet new people and form new friends, but I didn’t elaborate on how to turn people from acquaintances to close friends. For many, this transformation of their relationships with others will simply happen naturally as they spend consistent time around the same people week after week. Others, however, might find themselves attending a third place regularly for months to discover they still only barely know the people they see there.

Therefore, I will, in the course of this blog, share some more specific tips for how to form closer relationships with others you meet and still don’t know very well. This will be using a guide found in dialectical behavioral therapy primarily and the first step is finding something to talk about and introducing yourself.

The Art of Small Talk

Beyond the basics of asking someone what their name is and providing your own, it may be hard to work through the small talk step of socializing. Many people often say they are terrible at small talk and despise it. However, hopefully, if these same people can begin to see small talk as a necessary step and bridge to deeper, more meaningful conversion, they can have a newfound appreciation for it. Furthermore, after I provide some tips, people may find it easier to do and like it more as a result.

The first main tip is to talk to someone present after introducing yourself about whatever the main excuse for gathering is if you are meeting them in a third place. For instance, if you meet them at church, you can talk to them about the sermon, the pastor, ask about the history of the group, etc. If you are meeting someone playing a game like Warhammer or Magic the Gathering you can discuss that hobby with them. If you meet someone playing basketball at the gym, perhaps afterward, you can talk about how the game went and sports in general. Of course, if this sort of conversation starter can’t be made to work where you are talking to someone you hardly know, there are a few common topics people generally will like to talk about.

Stereotypically an example of a safe small talk topic is the weather, but it could be a number of things. For example, sports are often a popular safe topic of discussion, as are cars, fashion, animals, food, etc. Of course, these topics should be introduced only after gauging if the other person is interested in the topic by asking if they, for example, watch sports, own any pets, if they know any good places to eat locally, etc. Then, once you find an acceptable topic of conversation, you simply say something about it and wait for the other person to respond. If they don’t, you can just ask them a relevant question, followed by saying something relevant after they respond.

Of course, not everyone will be open to becoming your friend or talking to you at that moment in time. So, if they seem completely disinterested, it might be best to cut your losses and find someone else to talk to. However, once you do find somebody who is interested in talking to you, open to making new friends, and after you’ve had quite a few good conversations with them, you can begin to steer the conversation in a more personal direction.

Firstly, you will want to start by asking them more personal questions about themselves and then answering the questions yourself, even if they don’t ask you to. You can start by asking them what music they like, what shows and movies they like, what characters from these they enjoy and why, etc. Then, you can move on to asking them what they usually do in their free time, what they do for work, etc.

Once you are even closer, you can even ask them what they plan to do in the immediate future through questions like, “Do you see yourself living here in the long term,” or “Do you enjoy your work and see yourself still doing it in the long term,” or, “What do you plan to do after college?” From these questions, you can begin to infer a lot of their values, personality, and life goals. Then, you can determine if this is someone you can see yourself getting along with once they get to know who you are fully.

The Importance of Shared Values and Interests

For instance, if you don’t like to drink alcohol or do drugs and someone says they like to go to the bar a lot or house parties where drugs are involved, perhaps that wouldn’t be a good fit for a close friendship. Another example would be if someone says they spend a lot of time attending events at a local fundamentalist church and you’re lgbt; that might be a good sign that person, too, might not make the best candidate for close friendship either.

After all, you want a close friend to be someone you can trust and who can accept you once they get to know you truly. Additionally, close friends are drawn by each other and will want to spend some amount of time together, which will require some level of compatible personalities and shared interests. Furthermore, to better determine if someone has the right sort of interests, values, and personality to become a good friend to you will likely require further, more direct questioning if no red flags have appeared so far.

For example, if you have known someone for a decent amount of time and gone through the prior levels of intimacy, you can ask them if they are religious or not. If they are religious, you can ask them more about their faith. You can also ask them who they voted for last election and why, or who they plan to vote for next and why. Alternatively, you could ask them what they think of the current presidency. Another alternative question you could ask them would be what they think of a current political topic in the news. Their answers should give you a much better idea of whether or not the two of you would be likely or not to be compatible enough for a close friendship.

If their values are too divergent from your own to be likely compatible, then you will have to decide whether or not you want to keep your mouth shut and keep them as a more distant friend/acquaintance or whether or not you want to share your opinion and risk starting an argument which would likely strain the existing relationship. Some people can be surprisingly open-minded so you might find them pleasantly accepting of your difference of opinion. On the other hand, sharing your answers to these questions on politics or religion when you don’t share the same opinions as the person you are talking to can be a risk. So, you will have to weigh your options and make that call.

However, if they provide answers that are similar enough to your own then feel free to much more readily share your thoughts, as it will make the two of you feel closer and more connected. Once you make it past this stage and find you are becoming closer with this individual and like them and they like you, you can then move on to further stages of emotional intimacy.

The Start of a Close Friendship

For instance, now you can start sharing your true opinions with them on how you feel about other people you both know or places you’ve both been to. You can also share any more controversial opinions with them you might have so far been reluctant to tell them, if these opinions are still within reasonable bounds of appropriateness, of course. At this point, you both can also start sharing personal stories from each other’s past and learn more about who each other’s friends and family are and what those relationships are like.

During or before this stage in the relationship, you should have hopefully shared a few close moments, like a time you both started laughing heavily together. This could even be a time one of you perhaps comforted the other through a difficult time and saw them cry. Assuming the friendship is still going strong, you can finally now feel safe to become very close friends through further mutual self disclosure.

For example, you can both begin to share embarrassing and even shameful past experiences with each other that you would never want strangers to know about. You could both begin, if you haven’t already, to tell each other how much you care about each other and like spending time together. The two of you can also begin to share insecurities you possess to each other and problems you are working on and struggling with. Through mutually sharing vulnerability with each other like this, the friendship can become all the more closer.

Of course, a relationship at its absolute closeness, as seen in very successful marriages or with the best of friends, would include people making very clear to each other how much they love the other person. Additionally, people this close would be willing to make serious sacrifices to preserve and protect their relationship. People this close would be the type to take tremendous care of the other person they’re close to during serious illness and disability without any hesitation, for example.

They’d be able to absolutely trust one another and count on each other’s support. Those in the closest of relationships also would share their most vulnerable emotions with each other that they might not have even ever told anyone else before. They would know everything about each other. At this point, the relationship would be about as close as two people can expect to ever be with one another. However, in order to get to this point takes a lot of aforementioned steps.

Summary

First, it takes meeting a new person and making safe small talk with them to build a rapport and see if they’re interested in talking with you and getting to know you. Next, you will want to gradually talk about more and more personal topics that reveal their interests, personality, and values to see if they’d be the right fit for you. Then, you will want to directly discuss their takes on things and, more directly, their values. Additionally, of course, if you’d like to deepen the relationship you will want to share your answers to these questions as well, with them.

Afterward, you can begin sharing all sorts of things about yourself, such as how you truly feel about a number of places or people, how things are going for you in life, who your friends and family are, and what your relationship is like with them, stories from before you met them, etc. They should be making these sorts of self-disclosures just as much as you. When and if they do, then you both can begin to share all sorts of embarrassing private details about each other, vulnerable emotions and struggles you deal with, and really let each other know you care about each other if you haven’t already. At this point, if you made it this far with someone, you should have a very close relationship together!

Just know that it is important that all of these steps are done gradually and taken up a notch one step at a time. You don’t want to be Patrick Star from Spongebob telling someone you love them the first time you meet them. Furthermore, if you want to develop a closer relationship with someone, you want to make sure you are taking steps to share things about yourself and learn about the other person, progressing the relationship. However, the mutual self-disclosures have to be just that, mutual. If someone doesn’t open up to you at some stage in the process you have to accept they aren’t ready or willing to become closer to you and will only become so on their own time of their own volition. Friendship can never be forced.

So it isn’t recommended to try to increase the level of intimacy in a relationship through further self-disclosures if they haven’t matched your prior sharing of information. Also, it can take a lot of time to get to this point with someone, so patience is a virtue. You’ll likely have to talk to someone on a consistent basis for months, if not years, to form a truly close bond with them. However, considering how important friendship is in life for our happiness and well-being, it is something worth doing.