Why is it easier to talk to someone you don’t know?

It’s late, the taxi is crawling through traffic, and somewhere between the second roundabout and your street you hear yourself telling the driver about the job you’re thinking of quitting. You haven’t told your partner. You haven’t told your best friend. But you’ve just told a man whose name you never caught.

If that sounds familiar, nothing is wrong with you. More than a decade of research by the sociologist Mario Luis Small suggests it’s one of the most ordinary things people do. And the reason it’s often easier to talk to someone you don’t know says a lot about how closeness actually works.

Who do people actually confide in?

For nearly thirty years, social network researchers worked with a tidy assumption. In 1985, the US General Social Survey asked Americans to name the people they discuss “important matters” with, and that question became a standard research tool. Researchers widely treated the answers as a map of each person’s closest relationships. Your confidants, the thinking went, are your inner circle.

Nobody had properly tested that. So in 2013 Small did. Using a representative online survey of 2,000 people, he looked at who was in each person’s “core discussion network” and how much those people mattered to them. The result: 45% of the people respondents discussed important matters with were people they did not consider important to them.

Some were doctors. Some were co-workers. Some were spiritual leaders. People confided in them without feeling emotionally attached. Small described two routes in. Sometimes we seek someone out because they know about the problem (he called this “targeted”). Sometimes they’re simply there when the thing comes up (“opportune”). The colleague at the next desk on the day the test results arrive. The friend of a friend who has been through a divorce.

In his 2017 book Someone To Talk To, Small followed graduate students through repeated in-depth interviews as they dealt with stress, self-doubt, failure, health problems and money worries, then tested his ideas on nationally representative surveys of American adults. Same pattern. People often steered around close friends and family, because those relationships are complicated and full of expectations, and turned to whoever could offer understanding. When the need for empathy was strong enough, it tended to beat the worry about trusting the wrong person.

Why don’t we tell the people closest to us?

In 2024, Small, Kristina Brant and Maleah Fekete flipped the question. Instead of asking who people talk to, they asked who people avoid. Using a 2019 survey of 1,108 US adults from NORC’s AmeriSpeak panel, a nationally representative sample, they looked at the people respondents felt close to and the personal difficulties they had recently faced.

Their headline finding, published in the American Sociological Review: when facing personal difficulties, adults were as likely to avoid their close friends and family as to talk to them.

Two details make it even more interesting.

• Most avoidance isn’t a decision. It was mostly passive. People didn’t weigh up telling their brother and decide against it. It just never occurred to them that he was someone they could talk to about this.
• It’s about the pairing, not the person. Avoidance wasn’t limited to one difficult relative or one taboo subject. It depended on the combination: this topic, with this person. You might tell your mum everything about work and nothing about money.

The researchers drew on the sociologist Georg Simmel to explain it: people need both to reveal and to conceal. You want to be known. You also want some say over how you’re known. They concluded that it makes no more sense to define your close ties as the people you trust than as the people you avoid. Often, they’re both.

So why is it easier to talk to someone you don’t know?

The studies measure what people do more than why, but the reasons aren’t hard to recognise. Closeness raises the stakes.

• They’ll remember. Your best friend will still be your best friend next year, holding what you said. The taxi driver won’t.
• They’ll worry. Telling your dad about the panic attacks can mean managing his panic too.
• They’re connected to everyone else. Close circles overlap. Tell one cousin and you may have told the family.
• They already have a version of you. The reliable one, the funny one, the one who has it together. Saying the hard thing can feel like breaking it.

Someone outside your circle has no history with you to protect and no shared future to put at risk. That doesn’t make them a better listener. It just makes the first sentence easier to say.

Can you feel lonely with people all around you?

One idea from the 2024 paper is worth sitting with. The authors suggest that isolation might be less about having no one close, and more about having to avoid the people who are close, again and again.

That describes a loneliness that’s easy to miss: a full contacts list, a family group chat that pings every day, and one thing you can’t say to any of them. If that’s you, you’re in very large company.

A fair caveat: these are surveys of American adults, and they describe what people do, not whether it’s good for them. Confiding outside your circle isn’t automatically better. It’s just far more common than we assume.

How to open up when it feels hard

1. Think in pairings. Swap “I can’t talk to anyone” for “Who could I talk to about this?” Your sister might be wrong for the money thing and perfect for the health thing.
2. Go targeted on purpose. People often seek out someone who knows the territory. A GP, a counsellor, a colleague who survived the same restructure, a support group. Knowledge can matter more than closeness.
3. Test the water with someone close. Share a low-stakes version first (“work’s been rough lately”) and see how it lands before you say more.
4. Say what you need. “I don’t need advice, I just need to say this out loud” makes it easier for both of you.
5. Talk to someone new about the big questions. Not necessarily your hardest secret. Just the things that never come up with people who think they already have you figured out.

If something feels heavy or unsafe, a doctor or a trained professional is always a good person to bring it to.

Where Everconnected fits

If you’d like to try this with someone new, Everconnected matches you with people who share your values and interests, for one-to-one conversations by voice. It’s free to join: create an account at app.everconnected.com, or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.

Questions people ask

Sources

1. Small, M. L. (2013). Weak ties and the core discussion network: Why people regularly discuss important matters with unimportant alters. Social Networks, 35(3), 470-483. doi.org/10.1016/j.socnet.2013.05.004
2. Small, M. L. (2017). Someone To Talk To: How Networks Matter in Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. inequality.hks.harvard.edu/publications/someone-talk
3. Small, M. L., Brant, K., & Fekete, M. (2024). The avoidance of strong ties. American Sociological Review, 89(4), 615-649. doi.org/10.1177/00031224241263602
4. American Sociological Association (2024). Isn’t that what friends are for? Maybe not: New study [press release]. www.asanet.org/isnt-that-what-friends-are-for-maybe-not-new-
5. NORC at the University of Chicago. General Social Survey Topical Report 11: The Discussion Networks of the American Population (background on the 1985 GSS “important matters” question). amerispeak.norc.org/content/dam/gss/get-documentation/pdf/re