Health Benefits of Building Bonds With Your Partner Via Self-Disclosure

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When you’ve got something on your mind, it’s easy to let it go from slight concern to major preoccupation. Gillian messed up a major assignment at work, and she’s certain that it will get her fired. As she tosses and turns all night trying to figure out how to fix things, her fears continue to mount. This goes on for a few days, and by the end of the week, she’s exhausted and developing a bad case of the sniffles.

Situations in which you become preoccupied and worried can, as you can certainly attest, eat away at you. As shown in a new study, even as you try to solve problems that seem insolvable, you can protect your health—mental and physical—by confiding in your romantic partner.

The Value of Confiding in Your Partner

According to St. Louis University’s Lijing Ma and Eddie Clark (2025), communicating with your romantic partner, particularly the kind that involves self-disclosure, is a great way to build and strengthen your relationship. As the walls between you and your partner come down, the bonds between you will only grow deeper. In the words of the authors, “If two people do not share personal information with each other, then their relationship may not become intimate.”

It’s not just any kind of self-disclosure that matters, however. For your relationship to grow, that self-disclosure should involve information that is personal and serious. Social penetration theory, the basis for the Ma and Clark study, suggests that, like an onion, peeling away at the outer layers of your psyche leads to increasing feelings of intimacy toward your partner.

Testing the Intimacy-Health Connection

The St. Louis U. team cites previous research showing that self-disclosure of the “inner onion” kind affects a host of relationship outcomes, including liking or love, trust, satisfaction, and commitment. All of this augurs well for the relationship’s health, but how about each partner’s physical health?

Numerous studies, plus health survey records, show that people in a relationship are physically healthier and less likely to develop chronic diseases than those who aren't partnered. The magic ingredient behind all this, Ma and Clark predicted, is the self-disclosure that keeps relationships going.

To test this prediction, the authors recruited an online sample of 385 adults (average age 40 years) in relationships for an average of nearly 9 years. The measure of willingness to self-disclose included ratings of whether participants would discuss times they felt depressed and times they felt happy. The authors also asked participants to complete measures of self-esteem, romantic love, trust, commitment, and satisfaction. To assess physical health, the research team administered a standard self-rating scale asking whether participants felt limited in their ability to carry out daily tasks and various physical activities (swimming, running, lifting heavy objects).

The findings supported the value of self-disclosure as a boost to physical health via both self-esteem and relationship quality measures. Furthermore, the results were stronger for women, with willingness to self-disclose affecting health through the mediating effects of trust and relationship satisfaction.

It’s Time to Peel Away Those Layers

In discussing the implications of these findings, the authors address one very obvious fact. People who aren’t in romantic relationships don’t have someone to confide in, at least not at the level of intimacy you’d expect among two people who love each other. To experience the potential health benefits of self-disclosure, they might be advised to confide in a close friend or family member.

Returning to Gillian’s situation, the findings suggest that rather than keep her job worries to herself, she finds someone—romantic partner or otherwise—to share her distress with. Maybe she always tries to keep her work and personal life separate. By shutting out the person or people she’s close to, she’s only making matters worse.

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There’s another benefit that Gillian could derive from self-disclosure. Using another person who knows her well as a sounding board might produce an unexpected outcome if that other person comes up with an idea that Gillian hadn’t considered. Laying out the problem so that someone else understands it is a great way to take a new perspective on a seemingly intractable mess.

Think, too, about those so-called “mediating” factors of trust, commitment, and even self-esteem. When you confide in another person, there’s always a risk. If that risk proves to be non-existent, you’ll not only feel better about yourself (self-esteem) but also more likely to feel you can trust that person. Trust, in turn, builds commitment.

To sum up, relationships can benefit physical health, as is well-known from prior research. As shown in the Ma and Clark study, these benefits accrue when you let your guard down and express your true self to your partner.