How do you really get to know someone and when does that all happen? How do you get to know each other when you have different communication styles? Where is the line between sharing and oversharing and more importantly, where is the line between caring and controlling? And how to listen, instead of preparing your response. In a relationship, hoping to be, or recovering from one? Well listen in.
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Hello friends or welcome back. We have a lot to talk about today so let’s get into it. So this podcast idea came from a listener, Marci, who was asking me if we should share so much in the beginning of a relationship or is it considered dishonest if we don’t? And how do you really get to know someone without all of that sharing, and how long that takes and the answer is, it depends. As the Stephen King book “Life of Chuck” says, “I contain multitudes” and we all do. We all have layers of ourselves that we only allow to be seen when we are safe and we all have masks that we wear intentionally or not. There are so many levels to knowing someone...there is the surface level, which comes pretty quickly. You learn their job, their family situation, their general vibe, their taste in music, whether they’re a morning person or someone you should not speak to before coffee. Then there’s the behavioral level, which takes longer. This is where you start to see how they handle stress, how they treat people who are not in a position to do anything for them, like how they treat wait staff which I think is a huge indicator of behavior. How they behave when things don’t go their way, whether they apologize when they’re wrong or whether they just kind of go quiet and hope you forget. And then there is one of the deepest levels, the values and wounds and patterns that shape everything, the stuff that took years to form and does not reveal itself easily. That one? That one takes real time and it takes a lot of trust. It takes vulnerability to reveal the deep dark them and we all have those deep dark parts that we don’t like about ourselves, that we even hide from ourselves sometimes.
Psychologist Jeffrey Hall at the University of Kansas actually looked at this question of how long it takes to get to know someone. His research found that it takes roughly fifty hours of time together to move from acquaintance to casual friend, around ninety hours to become a genuine friend, and upward of two hundred hours to reach the level of close friend. Now that’s just friendship, not romantic partnership, but the principle still applies. Depth of knowing someone is not about calendar time. It’s about accumulated, quality, present time spent together. Which means you can date someone for a year and barely scratch the surface if most of your time together involves watching Netflix side by side without really talking, and on the flip side, you can feel like you genuinely know someone after three intense, real, open months together. Time is the container, but what you put in it is what actually matters.
And this is where I think a lot of people go wrong, not because they are doing anything malicious, but because we’re so excited in the beginning, and excitement is not always the most patient state of mind. We want to feel close quickly and skip to the good part. We rush intimacy, we over-share early, we start planning a future or thinking of love before we even really know this person under ordinary, stressful, boring, everyday circumstances. And ordinary, stressful, boring, everyday circumstances are actually where people reveal themselves most honestly. Anyone can be charming on a date. It takes a little longer to see how someone handles a delayed flight, a frustrating phone call, a disagreement about something that actually matters.
Now sharing is wonderful but you do not need to dump your entire history on someone in the first month of dating. I think a lot of us feel you meet someone and it feels so good to be seen and heard that you open every drawer of trauma at once. And what usually happens is one of two things. Either they get overwhelmed and retreat, or you end up feeling weirdly exposed before the relationship has really earned that level of vulnerability.
Sharing is important. Openness is important. But there is a difference between being authentic and being an open mic night of your past traumas. Past relationships are a perfect example of this. Yes, your new partner deserves to know things that are relevant like if you have a tendency to shut down during conflict because of something that happened in a previous relationship. That helps them understand your behavior and gives them a chance to respond to you in a way that actually works. But the play by play of every relationship you have ever been in, with full character descriptions and updated grievances? That tends to do more harm than good. It can make your new partner feel like they are being compared, whether to the good stuff or being held responsible for prior bad stuff.
So share what illuminates rather than what just unloads. If telling someone something about your past helps them understand who you are now and how to love you better, share it. If you’re sharing it because it still has a grip on you and you’ve not fully processed it, that might be worth working through on your own first, or with a therapist, before you bring it into something new. You’re not required to be an open book from page one, instead allow the story to unfold over time.
Now what about communication styles. We spend so much time talking about what people say and not enough about how they say it, and how they prefer to receive it, and what happens when those two things do not match up. The reality is that every person comes into a relationship with a communication style that was essentially formed before they ever met you. It was shaped by their family, their childhood, their previous relationships, their personality, their nervous system. Some people process out loud. They need to talk through something in real time, even if they are not fully sure what they think yet, and the talking is how they figure it out. Other people are internal processors. They need to go away, think it through, feel it through, and then come back with something more solid. If you’re an external processor with an internal processor partner, and neither of you knows this about yourselves, you may have the same argument over and over and never understand why.
The external processor, the partner who goes quiet can seem like they’re shutting down, not caring enough to engage. And to the internal processor, the partner who pushes for conversation immediately feels overwhelming, pressuring, like they can’t get a moment to actually think. Neither one of them is wrong, just different. And without that understanding, different starts to feel like broken or not sustainable in a relationship.
So how do you figure out what your partner's communication style is? Some of it is observation. Pay attention to how they behave when something is bothering them. Do they come to you right away or do they go quiet first? Do they prefer a text over a face to face conversation for difficult topics? Are they someone who needs the conversation to happen now or someone who gets overwhelmed if it’s too soon? And some of it is just asking, in a genuine, curious, I want to understand you better kind of way. You can literally say, hey, when something is on your mind, what is the most helpful way for me to be there for you? That question alone, asked sincerely, opens more doors than most people realize.
Maya Angelou said “listen to someone carefully enough and they will tell you everything.” Most people tell you who they are in the small moments. They tell you in what they get excited about, in what makes them go quiet, in how they talk about the people in their lives, in what they laugh at and what they take seriously. Listening is not passive. Real listening is one of the most active, intentional, generous things you can do for another person. I think most of us believe we’re better listeners than we actually are but I’ll tell you I have to make an effort to really listen. Real listening is hard. It requires you to be present in a way that our brains are not naturally inclined. We’re always processing, categorizing, preparing a response, relating what we’re hearing back to our own experience. And all of that is very human and very normal and also really gets in the way of actually hearing what someone is saying.
One of the most practical shifts you can make is to listen to understand rather than listen to respond. When you’re listening to respond, part of your brain is already composing your reply while the other person is still talking. You are catching keywords and building a case or a counterpoint. I know when I’m not listening, part of it is that I have a thought and I’m so afraid to lose it that I not only stop listening but I interrupt. It’s an awful habit so I’ve begun at work to keep a notepad and add a word or two to remind me of the thought to bring it up when there is a pause. So when you’re listening to understand, you’re staying with them until they are finished. You’re noticing not just the words but the tone, the body language, and what they’re emphasizing. You’re asking follow-up questions that show you were actually tracking what they said
And those questions are not just yes or no, make the most of genuine open questions, like “how did that feel for you”, or “what was going through your mind when that happened”. Open questions invite people into their own experience rather than steering them toward yours. And when people feel genuinely invited to share, they usually do.
Now with these different styles, how do you tell the difference between a red flag and immaturity? Because they’re not the same thing, one you might have to walk away from, one you might help support as they grow. Let me use an example that I think a lot might relate to. Your partner seems uncomfortable, or maybe more than uncomfortable, with your friendships with people of the opposite sex. Maybe they bring it up a lot, get quiet or make little passive aggressive comments. Is that a red flag or is it immaturity? And the answer, honestly, is that it depends on a few things. A red flag is a pattern of behavior that is about control, not about fear. A red flag is someone who tries to limit who you can spend time with, who checks your phone, who isolates you from your social world, who punishes you, emotionally or otherwise, for having a life that existed before them and that’s never ok. That’s not insecurity looking for reassurance. That’s control and it doesn’t generally improve with time or patience, instead it escalates and gets much worse.
Immaturity, on the other hand, often looks similar on the surface but feels different underneath. Immaturity is someone who gets jealous because they genuinely do not feel secure in themselves yet, not because they want to own you, but because they’re still figuring out how to believe they are enough for you. They might express it badly. They might say something that sounds possessive when what they’re actually feeling is scared. It still doesn’t mean it’s acceptable, but it does mean the root cause is different, and the root cause matters when you’re deciding what to do about it.
Research from attachment theory by psychologist John Bowlby noted that people with what is called anxious attachment tend to fear abandonment intensely typically from their early life based on whether their emotional needs were consistently met. In relationships, this can show up as jealousy, clinginess, needing constant reassurance, and yes, sometimes discomfort with a partner's other relationships. It’s not a character flaw, but a wound that didn’t fully heal. The question is whether this person is aware of it and willing to work on it, or whether they expect you to manage their anxiety indefinitely while they do nothing about it.
And that’s really the difference between the red flag versus immaturity. Immaturity that’s acknowledged and being worked on is a very different thing from immaturity that’s denied, excused, or placed on you to fix. Someone can absolutely grow through their insecurities inside a relationship, but only if they’re willing to own them first. If every conversation about the behavior ends with you somehow being the problem, that’s information. If every attempt to name the pattern leads to defensiveness and counter-attack, that’s also information. So it’s information to decide when is it worth it to stay and support someone through their growth, and when do you have to acknowledge that someone is just not ready for what you’re trying to build together? This is one of the hardest questions in relationships, and I’ll say now, there is no formula. But there are some things worth asking yourself.
First, is this person aware? Do they see the thing you’re seeing? You can’t help someone grow through something they refuse to acknowledge exists. Awareness is the starting point. Without it, all of your support and patience and loving conversations just become you carrying something for them that they need to carry themselves.
Second, is there movement? It doesn’t have to be fast, as we’re always saying here, little by little. But are they having different conversations about it than they were six months ago? Are they taking any steps, even imperfect ones, toward understanding themselves better? Are they in therapy, reading, reflecting, asking for feedback and actually receiving it? Someone who’s trying imperfectly is very different from someone who’s not trying at all.
Third, and I think this one is the most important, what is it costing you? You can care deeply about someone and still recognize that waiting for them to be ready is costing you things you can’t get back. Your peace, your confidence, your sense of self, your time. That’s not a selfish calculation, it’s an honest one. Sometimes the most loving thing for both of you is to acknowledge that this person needs to do some work, and they need to do it on their own, without the complexity of a relationship layered on top of it. You’re not giving up on each other but giving loving space to heal and grow.
The truth is that some people are not ready for a relationship right now, not because they’re bad people, but because they haven’t done enough of the internal work yet. And a relationship will not do that work for them. A relationship will actually reveal the work, which is useful, but it can’t substitute for the actual doing of it by the one who owns it. If you find yourself being someone's mirror, their therapist, their emotional manager, and their partner all at once, that’s not a partnership, that’s a project and you deserve a partner.
Getting to really know someone is one of the most rewarding things a human being can do. It takes time and it takes intention and it takes the willingness to be known in return, which is the part most of us find a little scarier than we like to admit. But it’s so worth it. The depth of connection that comes from truly knowing and being known by another person is something that no shortcut can manufacture and no algorithm can replicate. And it starts with slowing down, paying attention, asking better questions, and being willing to sit in the beautiful, complicated, occasionally maddening process of figuring each other out.
You don’t need to have it all figured out on day thirty. You’re allowed to not know yet. You’re allowed to say I am still learning this person, and I am taking my time with it. That’s not a lack of confidence, it’s wisdom. And on the flip side, if you’re the one with some work to do, with some patterns that keep showing up, some wounds that keep bleeding into your relationships, the best thing you can do for yourself and for the people you want to love is to take that seriously. Not as evidence that you’re unworthy or unlovable, you have always been worthy but you might need to heal and learn to love yourself to become more ready for the relationship you want.
So as we close today, think about whatever relationship you’re thinking about as you’ve been listening. What is the thing that you wish you’d known earlier about understanding a partner's (or family member or friend’s) communication style? Did you confuse a red flag for immaturity, or the other way around? What is something you have learned about listening that actually will change how you show up in your relationships? Tag someone who needs to hear this episode today, I’m sure we all have someone in our circle who is either in the thick of a new relationship trying to figure it out, or recovering from one where they never quite cracked the code, and sometimes the best thing you can do for a friend is hand them something useful like sharing this episode. So if this episode resonated then share it because this kind of conversation, the real kind, the one about how we actually connect with each other, is important. We talk a lot about finding love, we all love a good love story. But we don’t talk enough about building it, maintaining it, and knowing ourselves well enough to show up for it. So show up for yourselves, listen to understand, listen to others, listen to yourself. And learn to really get to know those you care about, learn to get to know yourself better. With understanding and awareness comes love, for you and all of those around you, little by little and peace by peace.
