How to Deepen a Surface-Level Friendship
Most adult friendships stall at pleasant but shallow. Moving beyond surface talk requires a specific kind of action — here's what the research suggests.
FirstMove Team
30 October 2025 · 7 min read
You like them. You always have a decent time when you see them. You've known them for two years and you still don't entirely know what's going on in their life. This is the surface-level friendship: warm, comfortable, and somehow never quite becoming anything more.
It's one of the more common forms of adult social frustration. You have plenty of people you could call acquaintances, a reasonable number you'd call friends. What you often lack is the small group of people who know you well and whom you know well in return — the classic acquaintance versus real friend gap. The surface-level friendship is the one that could become that — if someone made a move.
Why Friendships Stall
Adult friendships stall for a predictable reason: both people are waiting for the other to go first. Going deeper requires a small act of vulnerability — sharing something more honest than the surface content of your life, asking a question that invites a real answer, admitting something that isn't entirely flattering. Both people often want the friendship to go deeper but neither wants to be the one to make the first slightly awkward move.
The result is a stable equilibrium at pleasant shallowness. The friendship continues, both people enjoy it, and it never becomes quite what either of them wanted — one of the quieter reasons many people feel lonely even when surrounded by people.
Research by Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder at the University of Chicago demonstrates that people systematically overestimate how much others prefer surface-level interaction. In studies where people were prompted to have deeper conversations with strangers, both parties consistently reported enjoying the interaction more than they predicted. The barrier to depth is mostly anticipatory discomfort that doesn't materialise.
The Vulnerability Ladder
The most useful framework here is gradual escalation — moving the friendship up a level through a sequence of small disclosures rather than a single dramatic one.
Surface level is where most friendships start: opinions about things that don't matter much, mild self-deprecating observations, questions about professional status and general life facts. This is fine. Everyone starts here.
Moving up means sharing things you're not certain are safe — a political opinion you hold with some uncertainty, an ambition you haven't fully articulated to yourself yet, an aspect of your work that's difficult. These disclosures don't require crisis or drama. They just require slightly more honesty than comfortable social interaction normally involves.
The next level involves admitting something about yourself that isn't entirely flattering — a mistake you made, a fear you have, something you're struggling with. This is the rung most people avoid because it feels risky, particularly for anyone trying to make friends while managing social anxiety. In practice, genuine self-disclosure almost always improves how you're viewed, not the opposite. People tend to find honest vulnerability more endearing than the polished self-presentation it replaces.
What to Actually Do
The most direct approach is to ask better questions. Not "how's work going?" but "is there anything you're actually enjoying in your work at the moment?" Not "how are you?" but "what's something you're finding difficult lately?" These questions signal that you're interested in a real answer and give the other person permission to go beyond the surface.
The second approach is to share something slightly more personal than you normally would and notice what happens. This doesn't need to be dramatic — you don't need to confess your deepest fears. You need to share something genuine: a worry you're carrying, something you're genuinely excited about, something you're uncertain about. The signal you're sending is: I'm willing to be real in this friendship. If they reciprocate, you've moved up a rung.
The third is to change the context. Friendships that only exist in group settings rarely deepen because the group context suppresses individual disclosure. A one-on-one lunch or walk creates conditions for a different kind of conversation than a group dinner. If you want a friendship to go deeper, creating the right context for it is often the first practical step, and it's also one of the most reliable ways of keeping adult friendships alive once they exist.
Managing the Risk
The risk of going deeper in a friendship is real but smaller than it feels. The most common outcome of a slightly more genuine conversation is that the other person meets you in kind, and the friendship moves forward. The occasional outcome is that the friendship remains at a pleasant but shallow level — which is where it already is, so you've lost nothing.
The rare outcome is awkwardness — a disclosure that falls flat, a question that feels intrusive. This is worth risking, especially with a friendship that already has warmth. People generally don't end comfortable friendships because someone asked a slightly personal question.
What most people discover, having pushed through the anticipatory discomfort, is that the friendship they wanted was there all along — it just needed someone to go first.