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What if the rule you’ve been following about gossip, the one that says good people don’t talk about others behind their back, is actually making your friendships worse?
Not a little worse. Meaningfully worse. Like, leaving you more isolated, less protected, and without the tools to actually take care of the people you love.
I’ve been sitting with this question for a couple of years now. Turning it over, watching my own patterns, noticing when a conversation felt okay and when it felt like I’d crossed some line I couldn’t quite name. And I kept bumping into this tension between:
- ▪️ What we’re TOLD about gossip: that it’s catty, it’s shameful, it’s something good friends don’t do
- ▪️ What I was actually seeing in my friendships and in the research
So I did what I always do. I thought about it for approximately one thousand hours. And then I made this episode.
Here’s where I landed:
Gossip isn’t a moral failing. It’s how humans have always built and protected community.
And the blanket rule that says “don’t talk about people when they’re not there” isn’t making us better friends. It’s making us lonelier ones.
Let me show you why.
The Word “Gossip” Didn’t Start Out as an Insult
Most historical linguists trace the word gossip back to the Old English word Godsibb, which translates to “God relative.” Sib means kin or related.
A gossip was your godparent. Your spiritual kin. The person trusted enough to be at your birth, to be a major player in your life.
That’s not a slur. That’s an honor.
Over time, the term broadened to mean a close friend, a familiar acquaintance, a neighbor. Still a word about a RELATIONSHIP, not a behavior. Not a speech style. A person you trust.
Then, somewhere between the 14th and 16th centuries, something shifted. By the mid-1500s, the word started referring to the kind of social talk that happened when women gathered.
Picture a group of women doing the washing, sitting around a well, talking about life:
- ▪️ Who’s struggling
- ▪️ Who you can trust
- ▪️ What happened at the last gathering
- ▪️ What’s coming up
Safety information. Community information. The kind of talk that builds a web.
And a lot of historians argue the rebranding was deliberate. When women bond, share resources, share information with each other, it creates serious social capital. A strong web of awareness and truth. Rebranding that information sharing as dangerous or sinful? It delegitimizes women’s informal networks and the knowledge they carry.
This is not the first time something associated with women’s speech got turned into something derogatory. It won’t be the last.
If you want a genuinely wild rabbit hole, go research the history of gossip, the witch trials, the actual criminalization and punishment of women who gossiped. It will reframe a lot for you. I’m not going deep on that today, but I want you to know the history is there, and it matters.
🎧 There’s a lot more context in the full episode about how this history connects to the way we police conversation today.
What the Research Actually Says
Here’s the thing about modern social science: researchers define gossip in a pretty neutral way. Communication about a person who is not present. No built-in moral judgment.
Under that definition, gossip can be:
- ▪️ ✅ Positive (praise)
- ▪️ ➖ Neutral (information)
- ▪️ ❌ Negative (criticism or rumor)
It includes face-to-face conversations, texts, DMs… all of it.
And the data is interesting.
- ▪️ People gossip about 52 minutes a day on average
- ▪️ Only about 15% of all gossip is actually malicious
- ▪️ Men and women do it in equal amounts
Read that again.
The cultural story that gossip is shameful, catty, and feminine? The research does not back that up. Most of what we call gossip is neutral information sharing. It’s how humans have always maintained social networks and figured out who to trust.
And then there’s Robin Dunbar. He’s an evolutionary psychologist who has done groundbreaking research on friendship and community, and he has a theory that I find genuinely fascinating here. He argues that language itself evolved as a more efficient form of social grooming [In his book Grooming, Gossip and Evolutionary Language]
Think about gorillas. They spend enormous amounts of time physically grooming each other, picking through fur, sitting close. It’s not really about hygiene. It’s about cementing alliances, reducing tension, building trust, maintaining relationships. But it’s time-intensive, and you can only do it with one individual at a time.
Dunbar’s theory is that as human group sizes grew, vocal language became a way to groom at a distance. To cement alliances, build trust, and maintain relationships with multiple people simultaneously… just by exchanging social information.
What we experience as gossip isn’t a character flaw. It’s a mechanism.
We are literally wired to do this in order to build the social web that holds us up.
What Gossip Is Actually Doing in Your Friendships
Here’s where I want to get specific, because I think we don’t talk enough about what gossip actually DOES when it’s functioning well.
It helps you process a confusing or painful situation.
If you’re struggling with a friend, you might go to someone else to talk it through. That might involve saying some negative things about the friend you’re hoping to repair with. That’s not betrayal. That’s processing.
It helps you reality check.
A neutral third party might tell you that what you’re describing is not normal, that you don’t have to put up with it. Or they might tell you you’re overreacting. Either way, you needed someone outside your own head to help you see it clearly.
It can warn someone about a person who might hurt them.
Research actually shows that people will sacrifice money just to warn someone about a bad actor in a group. That’s gossip as protection. Gossip as care.
And here’s the one that connects most directly to something I talk about a lot on this podcast: it’s how friendship culture gets built and maintained.
Researchers have a term for this: norm talk. When you talk about someone else’s behavior with a friend, you’re not just venting. You’re negotiating what’s acceptable in your community. You’re drawing lines. You’re saying:
This is not how I want to be treated. This is not how you want to be treated.
You’re building shared understanding about what the group values and what it won’t tolerate.
Stripping all of that out in the name of “not talking about people” doesn’t make you a better friend. It leaves everyone more isolated, less informed, and without the tools to actually protect each other.
The Two Checks I Use Before (and During) a Conversation
Okay, here’s where I get personal. Because yes, I’ve done the research, but I’ve also spent years watching my own patterns. Going home after a conversation, thinking that felt okay. Or, that went somewhere I didn’t want it to go.
I’ve come up with two questions I ask myself. Sometimes, before a conversation. Sometimes in the middle of one.
The content doesn’t have to be positive. I might be talking about something frustrating, something painful, something scary. All of that is on the table. But is the direction of the conversation pointed toward something productive?
Am I:
- ▪️ Trying to figure something out?
- ▪️ Understanding a situation?
- ▪️ Brainstorming how to have a hard conversation?
- ▪️ Facilitating repair?
Or am I:
- ▪️ Just going in circles in the negative?
- ▪️ Marinating in victimhood?
- ▪️ Being malicious about someone I should be going to do repair with?
If the outcome I want is a solution, whether that’s repair, a boundary, or clarity that I’m walking away, then I also need to be truthful. Because if I’m lying or exaggerating, I’m being malicious AND I’m not actually going to get any useful help. The information I’m giving this other person isn’t based on fact. They can’t help me.
I’ll be honest: I don’t always stay in bounds. Sometimes I veer. I can feel it when I do. And I’ve gotten comfortable saying out loud, in the middle of a conversation:
“I think I’m being too angry. I don’t want to say things about this person just because I’m mad. Let me get back on track.”
It’s almost like being your own judge. Telling yourself what’s permissible and what needs to be struck from the record.
This is a practice. Not a standard I’ve perfected.
I try to find a more neutral third party when I’m venting or processing. Someone who isn’t close to the person I’m talking about, so they’re not managing their own relationship with that person at the same time they’re trying to help me. Someone who can be objective.
I mainly do this because I don’t want to put my friends in a position where they feel split down the middle.
When the person I’m talking to IS close to the person I’m talking about, my bar goes way up. I have to be really honest with myself about what the actual point of the conversation is:
- ▪️ Is it to warn them?
- ▪️ Express concern?
- ▪️ Check if they’ve noticed the same thing?
- ▪️ Negotiate what’s acceptable in our shared friendship culture?
Because in that scenario, it’s not me venting. It’s a negotiation. They might come in and say, “I thought that was fine.” And then I have to actually sit with that. Take in how they experienced it. Let it shift what I thought going in.
What I’m trying to avoid at all costs is triangulation. Putting someone in a position where they feel like they need to fight part of my battle for me. That doesn’t move anything forward. It just creates more of a mess.
🎧 The full episode goes deeper into how I actually use these two checks in real conversations, including what it sounds like when I catch myself veering and course correct out loud. It’s worth hearing.
Where Gossip Actually Crosses a Line
I’m not here to tell you all gossip is fine. It’s not.
Here’s where I think it actually gets harmful:
- ▪️ When it’s not true or when you don’t know if it’s true, and you don’t disclose that uncertainty
- ▪️ When the motivation is to hurt someone, compete with them, humiliate them, or make yourself look better by comparison
- ▪️ When you’re sharing it with someone who just doesn’t need to know
- ▪️ When someone has explicitly asked you not to talk about it
- ▪️ When it’s driven by spite or self-interest
- ▪️ When it makes things worse, not better
The question is never just WHAT you’re saying. It’s why you’re saying it and where it’s going.
Where I Actually Land on All of This
I’ve been sitting with this for years. I’ve done the research. I’ve watched my own patterns. And here’s what I keep coming back to.
The guilt isn’t serving your friendships. It’s just making you second-guess very normal, very necessary human conversation.
You don’t need to feel like a bad person every time you talk about someone. What you CAN do is get more intentional about it:
- ▪️ Run the two checks.
- ▪️ Notice the direction.
- ▪️ Notice the audience.
- ▪️ When you feel like you’ve veered, say it out loud.
Because naming it is how you set communal understanding about what’s acceptable, and it’s how you course correct.
Gossip at its best is a form of communal care. It’s how we protect each other, understand each other, and stay connected.
The goal isn’t to stop talking about people. It’s to talk about them in ways that actually do something useful.
If you want to go even deeper into the communal side of this, go listen to Episode 99 with James Richardson on individualism. The tension between this very individualistic idea of “never talk about someone if they’re not there” and the way communal cultures actually work? That episode will add a whole other layer to this conversation.
Because the blanket rule that says good people don’t gossip? It was never really about protecting people.
And the sooner we stop treating it like a moral absolute, the sooner we can start having the real, honest, communal conversations that actually hold friendships together.
🎧 Listen to the full episode here: friendshipirl.com/episode173
Mentioned
- ▪️ Episode 99: Is Individualism Costing Us More Than We Realize? with James Richardson
- ▪️ Episode 12: The Roots of Friendship Framework [NEEDS LINK]
- ▪️ Robin Dunbar’s vocal grooming theory / social grooming research in his book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language
- ▪️ Norm talk: Shank, D. B., et al. (2019). Norm talk and human cooperation: Can we talk ourselves into cooperation? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 117(1), 99–123.
