how connection developsBeing able to tell someone what happened is one part of feeling close. Another is discovering that they understand what the experience meant to you. In their 1988 chapter on intimacy, Harry Reis and Phillip Shaver bring those moments together. One person expresses something personally meaningful, another responds, and the first experiences that response as understanding, validation and care. Intimacy develops through the exchange and the meaning each person finds in it.
The chapter brings together theory and existing research to propose a model of this process. Its subject extends from a single conversation to the trust and shared expectations of an ongoing relationship. By following what happens between people, Reis and Shaver explain how being known can become an experience of being valued, and how that experience can make further openness possible.
Sharing what an experience means
The authors distinguish communicating facts about ourselves from expressing our feelings about them. A listener can learn where someone grew up, what work they do and what happened during their day without yet understanding the personal significance of those experiences. Feelings reveal something further about what a person hopes for, values or fears.
This distinction has a place in the research the chapter reviews. Morton compared disclosure of personal facts with disclosure of feelings about life topics. Emotional disclosure was more closely associated with relationship closeness. The comparison helps explain why the privacy of a topic alone tells us relatively little about the intimacy of a conversation. What becomes known about the person matters alongside what becomes known about the event.
Reis and Shaver illustrate the point through a childhood encounter with a teacher. The same outward event could have felt humiliating or could have raised the child's standing among classmates. An account of the event leaves its emotional meaning open. Learning how the person experienced it gives a listener a more accurate basis for responding.
What becomes known can include a future someone is imagining. Drawing on the idea of possible selves, Reis and Shaver include who a person hopes to become and who they fear becoming. A wish or uncertainty can reveal something important even before it has become an event to recount. Responding to that part of someone means attending to what the possibility represents for them, rather than only to whether it seems likely to happen.
How people communicate also contributes. In Montgomery's research, outside observers judged openness through both the content of a conversation and its style. The participants themselves relied primarily on style. The qualities considered included emotional openness and receptiveness to the other person's communication. A conversation's openness therefore involved how people made room for one another, as well as the subjects they discussed.
Expression can also happen through tone, facial expression, touch and other behavior. Someone familiar with us may recognize a feeling before we put it into words. These signals take their meaning from the situation and the relationship. Reis and Shaver use the broader idea of expression to include personally revealing communication that may be unplanned or nonverbal. Their model makes room for being understood without requiring a carefully prepared account of ourselves.
The same account also makes room for adjusting the degree of involvement. The chapter describes people changing their gaze, distance or topic when an exchange feels too intense. Intimacy is not measured by how much someone reveals regardless of the setting. Attention to the other person includes noticing how much contact or disclosure fits this conversation and this relationship.
A response that reaches the person
The model draws together several ways of understanding close relationships. Sullivan emphasized the recognition of personal worth within friendship. Rogers described empathic acceptance as a condition in which people could become less defensive and more open. Attachment theory contributed an account of security in relation to an available, responsive caregiver. Across these traditions, Reis and Shaver identify a shared concern with how another person's response supports the experience of being accepted and known.
They also acknowledge the limits of those connections. In 1988, they noted that direct longitudinal evidence linking attachment from infancy into adulthood was still missing and that retrospective accounts of childhood presented difficulties. Their synthesis proposes continuity in important relational processes without establishing a fixed path from a particular childhood to a particular adult relationship.
Within an intimate exchange, the authors distinguish three qualities of the response as the person sharing experiences it. Understanding involves believing that the listener has grasped something accurate about one's feelings, needs, self-understanding or situation. This matters because a response can only fit a personal concern if the listener has some sense of what that concern is. Advice that addresses the wrong difficulty may be well intended while leaving the original experience unrecognized.
Validation builds on that understanding. It involves feeling that the person who understands us also appreciates what they have come to know. The authors emphasize appreciation of the self as the speaker understands it. General praise can miss this point if it celebrates qualities or motives the person does not recognize as their own. Understanding gives appreciation a personal relevance that a broadly positive response may lack.
Care brings affection and concern into the exchange. Being accurately understood is more comfortable when the other person's regard makes it possible to reveal something uncertain or vulnerable. Reis and Shaver connect this sense of care with the willingness to express fears, regrets and other experiences that might otherwise remain private. The person sharing is learning both whether the listener understands and how the listener regards what has become known.
These qualities give disclosure its place in the model. Sharing creates an opportunity for a responsive exchange. The research reviewed in the chapter did not consistently associate disclosure with greater liking and trust on its own. Its relational value depended in part on what followed. The authors therefore give the listener's response a role as central as the original expression.
Each person helps shape the exchange
Both people bring hopes and concerns into the interaction. Someone can want affection and understanding while also feeling hesitant about exposure. A listener can want to be supportive while feeling uncertain about what is being asked of them. These motives can change during a conversation as each person learns more about the other's response.
Interpretation happens on both sides. The listener first makes sense of what has been expressed. A gesture can seem affectionate, intrusive or strategic depending on the relationship and the circumstances. The person who shared then interprets the response. An intention to help and an experience of being helped are connected, but they are distinct parts of the process.
The chapter discusses evidence that makes this distinction concrete. In research by Gaelick and colleagues on emotional communication between couples, reactions to expressions of love were based largely on the recipient's perceptions, independently of how much love the speaker intended to convey. Reactions to hostility reflected both perceptions and intentions. The comparison supports the model's attention to what a communication becomes for the person receiving it. Intended affection alone did not fully explain the experience of the exchange.
Past experiences can shape these interpretations, but the authors also emphasize variation across partners and situations. In Miller and Kenny's research among sorority members, reciprocal disclosure was strongly associated with the particular relationship between two people, beyond each person's general tendency to disclose or receive disclosures. Openness was something developing within a pair. Context, mood and current goals also helped shape what a person expressed and how they responded.
This gives the model a more flexible account of intimacy than a description based only on personal traits. A person's warmth or reserve in one encounter cannot explain all their relationships. The specific exchange matters, including the listener's attention, the relevance of the response and the meaning the two people give it.
Listening and everyday care are part of intimacy
A listener can experience intimacy through understanding and caring for another person. Reis and Shaver discuss parents and therapists, who may feel deeply connected while revealing much less than the other person does. An infant cannot deliberately validate a parent's identity, and a therapist's role does not require matching a client's disclosures. These examples show why equal amounts of personal revelation are an inadequate measure of an intimate experience.
In relationships with more reciprocal roles, mutual care can unfold across time. The chapter draws on the distinction between exchanges organized around repayment and communal relationships in which people respond to each other's needs. Reciprocity can mean confidence that both people's concerns receive attention, without each act requiring an equivalent act in the same conversation.
Responsiveness can also take the form of action. People who know each other well may recognize a need and respond without a new disclosure. The intimate meaning lies in the way the act conveys understanding, appreciation and care within that relationship. This extends the model beyond revealing conversations to the ordinary ways people take one another's lives into account.
How moments of intimacy become a relationship
A responsive exchange can influence what happens next. In the authors' model, feeling understood and valued may reduce defensiveness and support trust. The participants may exchange roles, with the listener beginning to share and the other person responding. Each encounter contributes to the conditions for another. The feedback can also move in the other direction. An exchange that leaves someone feeling exposed or misunderstood may increase defensiveness and make another attempt less likely. In this model, willingness to open up develops partly through what has happened between these people, rather than being a fixed amount of openness that one person brings.
An ongoing relationship also develops qualities that extend beyond any single interaction. Reis and Shaver describe six features of this larger context. The first is a shared history and an anticipated future. Memories of earlier exchanges shape what people expect, while the prospect of continuing together can influence their willingness to be open now. Past experiences also become standards against which later encounters are understood.
Commitment adds a degree of continuity through changing feelings. The authors recognize that people remain committed for varied reasons, including affection and obligation. Within an intimate relationship, commitment can support the willingness to stay engaged through disagreement and to take a responsive listening role even when a particular moment is difficult.
A shared sense of the relationship develops too. Partners come to recognize a mutual bond and hold some common understandings about it. Alongside this shared perspective, reciprocity gives each person reason to expect that their own needs will receive attention. These features help explain how a relationship becomes a context in which both people can participate, rather than a series of isolated disclosures.
Public recognition adds another dimension. Friends, spouses or close siblings may be treated as a pair by other people, creating shared activities and experiences. The authors note that this can also complicate individuality. A shared social identity has consequences for each person's life, including how easily they are recognized as separate people.
Finally, stable expectations can develop into trust. Reis and Shaver discuss trust as extending beyond a prediction based on past behavior to confidence in the partner when the future is uncertain. That confidence can support further expression and responsive care. The relationship shapes intimate exchanges, and those exchanges continue to shape the relationship.
Disagreement belongs within this account. Discomfort, disappointment and anger can disclose something important about a person or the relationship. When met sensitively, they can contribute to understanding. The intimate quality of an exchange depends on how the experience is expressed and received, including when the feeling being shared is difficult.
The quality of connection
The chapter's discussion of loneliness helps explain why this process matters alongside the amount of social contact people have. In research by Wheeler, Reis and Nezlek, lack of intimacy predicted loneliness better than measures including interaction frequency, time spent socializing and number of partners. Other studies reviewed in the chapter similarly found satisfaction and intimacy more closely related to loneliness than interaction quantity. These comparisons direct attention to what people experience together, beyond how often they meet.
The authors also distinguish particular forms of support. Research by Reis linked interaction intimacy especially closely with feeling that useful advice and guidance were available and feeling integrated within a community of friends. These are recognizable experiences of support. They involve confidence in others' understanding and a place within relationships, qualities that a count of social contacts cannot establish by itself.
Evidence about personal adjustment extends the discussion across time. In research by McAdams and Vaillant, men with higher intimacy motivation in their early twenties showed better psychosocial adjustment in middle age. This longitudinal association concerns the importance of intimacy in people's lives. It does not establish that a particular conversation produces later well-being.
Reis and Shaver also recognize that close relationships can constrain independence, discourage growth or leave people feeling engulfed. Their account allows attention to the quality of closeness and to each person's continuing individuality. Everyday life contains practical exchanges, shared activities and periods of separate attention. The authors do not propose a universal frequency of intimate conversation, and they recognize that even an intimate relationship contains many interactions of other kinds. Within that life, intimacy can develop through moments when something personally meaningful is expressed and another person's response makes understanding, appreciation and care felt.
Sources
Reis, H. T., & Shaver, P. R. (1988). Intimacy as an interpersonal process. In S. Duck (Ed.), Handbook of personal relationships: Theory, research and interventions (pp. 367–389). John Wiley & Sons. DOI links to a later reprint.