Example Of Social Penetration Theory

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College is a prime example of how forgetting how hard it is to make friends with complete strangers after being friends with the same people for years in high school. Friendship is a meticulous concept that can be extremely rewarding if both parties put in equal effort. Social penetration is the idea that intimacy with someone else is a process that slowly evolves through the gradual exposure of one’s personal information according to Griffin (2012.) This theory is often compared to an onion because of the layers are similar to the different levels of self-disclosure that create new levels of closeness. Almost any relationship can be evaluated using the Social Penetration Theory with the exception of people such as family members. Just in …show more content…

All I really knew about this girl is that she went to Ohio State as well because of OSU’s roommate finder. Ten or so years ago this process might have been a lot scarier but today, there is Facebook. The ability to chat with my future roommate before actually meeting did a lot more good than I expected. Sometimes after first meeting someone, there is a period of awkwardness where you want to get to know them better but you just don’t know quite how. Facebook allowed my roomie and I to get all the awkwardness out of the way very quickly. The chats started off very simple; small talk allowed us to seem interested in each other while remaining polite. Once we knew all the basics about each other past names, hometowns and college majors, it was a bit confusing where to go next. I wanted my roommate to feel like I was genuinely interested in getting to know her without her thinking I was being to forward or pushy about personal questions. Our next step was interests. It was somewhat difficult to explain your likes to someone not in person. It’s much easier to really tell how much someone likes something by the way they talk about it, that aspect just wasn’t there through a screen. Nevertheless, we continued on about what we had done this summer and the excitement of the upcoming school …show more content…

I had never been one to believe that relationships can be just through the keyboard but I think it was the mindset that we would soon be living together that helped our online friendship blossom. Soon after that first day we slowly started talking about pretty much anything and everything. Once again it started off as things like friends back home and childhood memories. In a week or so it was problem solving boy issues and sharing nail polish. After the third week of living together, more serious topics came up. We were able to talk about the recent death of my childhood dog, the passing of grandparents and even our hopes and dreams for after

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