Run Game People

Brene Brown on vulnerability and connection

5 min read

Brene Brown is a University of Houston social work researcher who became widely known for her work on shame, vulnerability and connection. She defines vulnerability as "uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure," and her argument is that connection requires some of it. Readers apply that to dating as saying something real, like "I'd like to see you again," when you can't know the answer.

Who Brene Brown is

According to Wikipedia, Brown was born in 1965 in San Antonio, Texas. She earned her social work degrees at the University of Texas at Austin (a bachelor's in 1995, a master's in 1996) and a PhD in social work at the University of Houston in 2002. She has spent her research career as a professor at the University of Houston's Graduate College of Social Work.

Her books, with years:

Wikipedia says six of her books were New York Times number-one bestsellers as of 2021. She also hosts the podcasts Unlocking Us and Dare to Lead, and her Netflix special The Call to Courage came out in 2019.

Her TEDxHouston talk, "The power of vulnerability," is listed on TED as June 2010 and shows more than 71 million plays. TED's own description says it shares an insight from her research on human connection that led her to try to understand herself and humanity better.

The research behind it

Brown's published foundation is qualitative. In a 2006 paper in the journal Families in Society, she describes interviewing 215 women using grounded theory, a method that builds a theory from what people say rather than testing a theory set in advance. The abstract says the goal was to understand why and how women experience shame and what strategies they use to build what she calls shame resilience. It names three categories in the theory: acknowledged vulnerability, critical awareness and mutually empathic relationships. It also introduces the concept of "speaking shame."

The research behind her later books wasn't reviewed for this post. None of it is about dating specifically. Her field is shame, courage and leadership, and readers have applied it to relationships themselves.

What she says vulnerability means

Per a Psych Central summary of Daring Greatly, Brown defines vulnerability as "uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure." The title comes from Theodore Roosevelt's 1910 speech "Citizenship in a Republic," according to Wikipedia. A 2012 summary of the book on Psych Central lists three myths Brown challenges:

  1. Vulnerability is weakness.
  2. Some of us don't experience vulnerability.
  3. Vulnerability means spilling your secrets.

How readers apply it to dating

Brown's work isn't dating advice, so every link below is an interpretation by readers, not a finding.

Saying the real thing

Many readers connect vulnerability to small, honest statements. "I thought you looked interesting, so I came over" carries risk because the answer might be no. Mark Manson's Models makes a related argument in its own words about expressing yourself honestly. Both treat the risk of rejection as part of the act.

Sharing gradually

Brown's third myth, as Psych Central words it, is that vulnerability means spilling your secrets. A research result fits the idea of pacing. A 1994 meta-analysis of self-disclosure and liking by Collins and Miller, in Psychological Bulletin, found three effects. People who share intimate details tend to be liked more than people who share less. People tend to disclose more to people they already like. And people come to like others as a result of having disclosed to them. The abstract also says the strength of these relations depended on the study paradigm, the type of disclosure and the discloser's gender. So matching someone's level of openness, instead of jumping ahead, is a common approach. Arthur Aron's exercise follows the same pattern, as described in the 36 questions post.

Listening as the other half

A conversation where only one person is exposed isn't a connection. Empathy in dating covers hearing what the other person is saying, and deep conversation covers how to go beyond small talk.

Limits and criticism

Brown's work has been popular and has also been questioned. Writer Ben Baran, in an April 2024 commentary, noted that the 2006 study's sample was entirely women, that the paper doesn't explain how the participants were chosen beyond an aim of diversity, and asked whether the model has been tested quantitatively. He also wrote that, as best he could tell, her TEDx talk rests on a single peer-reviewed article, and acknowledged her books may contain research he hadn't read. Few peer-reviewed critiques turned up in a search for this post; most commentary is in interviews and blogs. Brown has described her method as grounded theory, which builds theory instead of testing it.

Wikipedia's article on her notes it reads in places like promotional content, so use it for dates, not praise.

What to take from Brene Brown

  1. Name the risk before you take it. Before your next approach, say to yourself, "I might hear no, and I'm doing it anyway."
  2. Say one true thing. Replace a line with a sentence you mean: "I noticed your book and wanted to say hi."
  3. Match openness. If someone shares something personal, answer with something of similar weight, not a joke or a bigger story.
  4. Share in steps. Offer one real detail per conversation instead of your whole history on a first date.
  5. Debrief after rejection. Write one line about what you felt and what you did anyway. Fear of rejection covers the feeling.
  6. Read before deciding. The TED talk is short. Daring Greatly is the book most tied to this topic.

If writing a line after each approach helps, Run Game lets you add a note to every log.

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