Have you ever come home from hanging out with someone new and felt… weird? Not bad, exactly. Just off. You’re lying in bed replaying the conversation, wondering if you said too much, wondering if they’re going to text you back, wondering if you somehow blew it with someone you were genuinely excited about.
That feeling has a name. I call it the new friend hangover. And if it’s happened to you more than once, I want you to know: you are not too much. You’re probably just moving too fast, and the reason you’re doing it makes complete sense.
This episode of Friendship IRL is about rushing into new friendships: the pattern of meeting someone, feeling that spark of possibility, and going all in before the relationship has had any chance to build the roots it needs to hold what you’re putting into it. We’re talking about oversharing in new friendships: why it happens, what it actually costs you, and what to do instead.
Why You’re Rushing (And Why It Makes Sense)
The urge to fast-forward a new friendship almost always comes from hunger. Real hunger. You want connection, and you want it now, and that is not a character flaw. Maybe you just moved to a new city. Maybe you’ve spent years prioritizing everything except friendship and you’re finally trying to fix that. Maybe you met someone who just felt like YOUR person and you went all in because it felt natural.
I have a friend I describe as the fastest friend I ever made. We clicked immediately and, looking back, we probably went a little hard in the sharing department early on. That’s not a flaw. That’s excitement. That’s possibility. That’s, okay fine, maybe a little desperation too. And desperation is allowed. You don’t have to be ashamed of wanting this.
The problem is the script we’ve all been handed for HOW to get from “I need friends” to “this is my good friend.” The whole cultural conversation about adult friendship centers on disclosure. Open up. Be vulnerable. Let people in. Share your deepest stuff. And if they can’t handle it, they weren’t meant for you.
If you’ve been following that script and it keeps backfiring, I want to offer you a different diagnosis. Because I don’t think the script is wrong exactly. I think it’s missing something enormous.
The Stages You’re Skipping
Here’s what the script leaves out: there are a lot of stages between stranger and close friend, and those stages matter.
I have a framework called the Wheel of Connection that maps your entire social landscape, every type of relationship in your life. (If you haven’t heard of it, go listen to Episode 100. It’s a good one to have in your back pocket.) Inside that wheel, when you look specifically at friendship, you move through formal community, then acquaintances, then familiar friends, then defined friends, and THEN present friends, what most people would call their closest people.
That’s four stages before you get to the friendship level where the deep sharing actually makes sense and feels natural. Four. And if you’re trying to go from first hangout to present friend in one conversation, no wonder it’s not working.
But here’s the part I really want you to sit with: you’re not just skipping stages. You’re skipping the GOOD stuff. Those early stages, the acquaintance phase, the familiar friend phase, that is your lore. That is your origin story. That’s the funny story you’re going to tell people about how you met. That’s the small weird detail you’re going to reference ten years from now. Just because you’re an adult doesn’t mean you don’t get to have that. You do. And when you rush past it, you lose it.
So before anything else: slow down. Not because it’s more strategic, but because the early stuff is genuinely worth having.
Listen to the full episode at friendshipirl.com/episode190 to hear me walk through the Wheel of Connection stages and why skipping them costs you more than just the friendship.
What Vulnerability Actually Means (This Is the Reframe)
Okay. Here’s the part I care most about.
We have been taught that vulnerability equals disclosure. That being vulnerable means telling someone your hard stuff, your past, your wounds. And so when we want to feel close to someone new, we do what we’ve been told: we share. We open up. We tell them the thing.
But I want to offer you a different definition of vulnerability. One that I think is a lot more useful, especially early in a friendship.
Vulnerability is risk in the presence of another person. That’s it. It doesn’t have to involve words at all.
Ordering the weird thing on the menu and not knowing if you’re going to like it. That’s vulnerability. Driving a new friend in your messy car and not apologizing for the stuff on the seat. That’s vulnerability. Going to a pottery class together where you’re both terrible and laughing about it. That’s vulnerability. Suggesting a restaurant you love instead of doing the endless “I don’t know, what do you want?” loop, knowing they might not like it. That’s vulnerability. Letting someone see you be silly, or bad at something, or uncertain.
All of that is risk in the presence of another person. All of that is intimacy. And it builds connection without either of you having to monitor what you’re saying or perform closeness you don’t quite feel yet.
I have a whole episode on small intimacies (Episode 74, link in the show notes) because this concept is central to everything I think about friendship. Small intimacies are the details you notice, the tiny ways you let someone in, the moments that accumulate over time into something real. They don’t require a confession. They just require you to be PRESENT.
This reframe is the thing I most want you to take from this episode. Once you understand that vulnerability is about risk, not disclosure, you have somewhere to put all that energy. You don’t have to hold it back. You just redirect it.
Sharing From a Scar, Not a Wound
When you ARE going to share something personal with a new friend, here’s a distinction I want you to hold onto: share from a scar, not a wound.
A scar is something that happened to you that you’ve processed enough that it’s basically just a fact now. A wound is something you’re still in the middle of, still raw, still working through.
Here’s a real example. I might be talking to a new friend and they ask if I’m going to see my parents this weekend. I might say, “I’ll see my dad, but my mom passed away when I was 13.” That’s a scar. It’s a fact about me. It lets someone in a little. But that is very different from me launching into how losing my mom is still affecting every relationship I have with women in my life and here’s why and here’s how.
That second version is a wound. And it belongs in a friendship where the roots are already established, where there’s enough shared history and trust to hold something that heavy. A brand new friendship doesn’t have those roots yet. That’s not a judgment. It’s just where you are.
Context matters, though. If you’re in a support group specifically for people who’ve lost a parent, the wound is appropriate to share. If you find out early that a new friend also lost a parent young, that shared experience might open the door faster. But as a default, lead with the scar. Let the wound come later, when the friendship can carry it.
And if you want to understand exactly WHY a new friendship can’t carry something heavy yet, go listen to Episode 12, where I break down the Roots of Friendship framework. When you look at a new friendship through that lens, you’ll see pretty clearly how few roots you have yet. And that’s not sad. It’s just the starting point.
If this is the part of the episode that hit closest to home, head to friendshipirl.com/episode190. I spend more time there on what the scar/wound distinction actually looks like in practice, including the moments where context flips the whole thing.
Don’t Restrict. Redirect.
Here’s where I want to get practical, because “just don’t overshare” is terrible advice and you already know it. You’ve probably told yourself to stop a hundred times. It hasn’t worked. And here’s why: restricting yourself requires so much self-monitoring that you end up in your head, performing a version of yourself that isn’t you, and people can FEEL that. There’s a weird stiffness to it. The connection suffers anyway, just in a different direction.
So instead of restricting, redirect.
Choose activities for your early friend hangs. Not just coffee across a table where you’re staring at each other with nowhere to put the energy. Go to a new art gallery. Try paddleboarding. Hit a board game shop. Take a pottery class. Go somewhere neither of you has been. Because when you’re DOING something together, two things happen.
First, you’re building connection through shared experience, which is exactly how you made friends as a kid. Through soccer practice and class projects and just being in the same place doing the same thing over and over. Nobody sat down at their desk cluster in third grade and said, “Okay, I need to open up about my home life so we can bond.” You just… did stuff together. And somewhere in all of that, you became close.
Second, when you feel that urge to go deep, you have somewhere to redirect your attention. Back to what you’re doing. Back to the moment. Back to the small intimacies that are happening right in front of you, if you’re paying attention.
Somebody notices you didn’t like something on the menu. Somebody gets up and brings you a glass of water without being asked. Somebody sees you be bad at pottery and laughs WITH you, not at you. That is connection. Not performed. Actual. And the closeness you’re chasing, being known, belonging, feeling like someone actually SEES you, it’s more likely to happen when you stop trying to manufacture it and just let it build from the experience you’re sharing.
You’re living a small piece of life together instead of just talking at each other about your lives. And honestly, when I put it that way, the second version doesn’t even sound that interesting.
You’re Not Too Much. You Just Need a Different Map.
If you’ve been in this pattern, rushing in, oversharing in new friendships, watching them fizzle before they had a chance to become real, the problem was never that you’re too much. The problem is that you were following an incomplete script.
The stages of friendship between stranger and close friend are worth having. Slow down enough to collect them. The early lore, the small intimacies, the moments of low-stakes vulnerability: those are the building blocks. Don’t skip them.
Share from your scars. Save the wounds for the friendships that have grown strong enough to hold them.
And when you feel the urge to go deep fast, redirect. Choose an activity. Be present. Notice the small things. Let the closeness come from being together instead of from telling each other everything.
This is how oversharing in new friendships stops being a pattern that costs you, and starts being energy you can actually use.
Have you ever caught yourself in this pattern mid-hangout, that moment where you realize you’ve already said too much? Drop it in the comments. I’d love to know what it felt like and what you did next.
If any of this landed, listen to the full episode at friendshipirl.com/episode190. The complete conversation goes deeper into every piece of this, including why the childhood friendship callback changes how you think about what vulnerability actually means.
