Do you remember Angelica from Chapter 2? You may recall her heavy debt due to her lifestyle (expensive vacations, a new car, a nice apartment, and so on). When she divulges her personal financial mishaps to a friend, she is self-disclosing, revealing very personal information. As you’ve likely experienced in your own life, self-disclosure has a powerful impact on the development of interpersonal relationships (Samter, 2003). The process of choosing what information to disclose to others and when has long fascinated communication researchers and scholars who note that it is informed by issues as complex as personality type and individual tendencies (Hesse & Rauscher, 2013), situational and relational variables (Frisby & Sidelinger, 2013), and culture (Chen & Nakazawa, 2012). Keeping these variations in mind, we now examine the ways in which the decisions to divulge or withhold personal information affect relationships.