To Build a Friendship, Break Down Your Walls

This is the final day of the 5-Day Friendship Challenge. To start at the beginning, click here.

The friendship experts I interviewed for this challenge all mentioned, in one form or another, how important vulnerability is to forming close connections. If you want big, deep platonic love in your life, you must be willing to put yourself out there emotionally.

Those therapists and researchers also acknowledged that the very idea of vulnerability makes a lot of us squirm.

“You risk rejection, exposure, judgment,” said Hope Kelaher, a licensed clinical social worker in private practice in New York City and the author of “Here to Make Friends.” “But it is the core component of any deep emotional intimacy.”

Friendship Challenge Day 5: Be vulnerable with a friend.

“Expose myself emotionally” probably wasn’t on your to-do list when you woke up, so here are a few ideas to help you start.

Ask a probing question (or 36 of them). Nearly a decade ago, The New York Times ran the article “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love” — which included a set of, yes, 36 questions that could help accelerate intimacy.

The questions had been generated for a study by researchers including Arthur Aron, a professor of psychology at Stony Brook University. Dr. Aron told me that he and his team had developed the questions to test whether they could create closeness between strangers, but there is growing evidence they can increase closeness between friends and romantic partners, too. Running through the full set takes about 45 minutes, and the questions get progressively deeper. Answer them with a friend to help foster mutual vulnerability.