The Gossip Monger
Gossip, trust, and the relationships we dissolve by talking too much.
Birmingham Museums Trust via Unsplash
I have some pollsters in my life.
They canvas regularly.
How are you? Who have you been seeing? What's going on with that person you mentioned?
The questions always arrive with warmth and regularity and the inflection of genuine interest. But I know what they're for. Whatever I say will be currency. And by the time the sun has set, they will have cashed in, and news of my relationships will have been shared with the masses.
The person asking the questions won't warn me of any of this, of course. But I know better than to approach our conversations with any expectation of privacy, as the questioners are often the type to share compulsively and with visible pleasure. They tend to carry other people's business into every room with a particular kind of pride—they love being the person who knows everything about everyone.
Knowing requires asking, of course, so they must do a lot of it. And the incessant asking—that insatiable hunger for information—becomes a tell to anyone who recognizes this archetype of person, what an old acquaintance used to refer to as the "gossip monkey". I prefer the term "gossip-monger".
I have a very low tolerance for gossip-mongers and their antics, but I don't know if it's possible or productive to remove them from my life entirely. So I bite every now and then and let some of them have some answers some of the time.
I have just learned to navigate my conversations with them with caution.
In 1963, anthropologist Max Gluckman wrote about gossip with a clarity that I believe has aged remarkably well. He argued that gossip is a "culturally determined process", or a regulated social behavior with rules and functions and consequences for breaking them.
He asserted that the right to gossip about a group is a "privileged badge of membership" in it. You're not really in until you know the scandals and who did what to whom and why it mattered.
Most of us have experienced some version of this: the moment someone pulls you aside and tells you something they didn't have to, and the warmth that follows. There's something indulgent about the interaction. You're receiving the information, yes—but more than that, you're receiving a signal embedded in the act of sharing it.
Gossip, in this way, is a social gesture or an invitation. It's shameful, but it's delectable.
Lea Ellwardt and her colleagues formalized this in 2012, finding that gossip between two people increases the likelihood of future friendship formation. The mechanism is fairly straightforward: sharing sensitive information about a third party functions as a "signaling device, a first step in the trajectory of building a strong personal tie." You're not just exchanging data. You're extending yourself. You're handing something over and waiting to see what the other person does with it.
The problem is what happens when you keep going.
There is a non-linear relationship between gossip and trust, and the non-linearity is where things get interesting.
Ellwardt's research identified that individuals with disproportionately high gossip activity end up with fewer friends in their networks, not more. The signal that once read as "I trust you" eventually starts reading as "I cannot be trusted." When someone shares secrets compulsively, the warmth of the original offer curdles. The receiver stops thinking this person values me enough to confide in me and starts thinking this person will do this to me too.
Francis McAndrew and his colleagues put it more bluntly: blatantly self-serving gossip harms the speaker more than the target.
This is the part that most enthusiastic gossipers seem not to recognize. They believe they are building bridges. And they are—right up until the point where they've built so many bridges that everyone on every side of every bridge starts quietly calculating their exposure.
Because the person who knows everything is also the person who could share anything. That is not a friend. That is a liability with a friendly face.
Gluckman called gossip a "socially instituted customary weapon." The people who wield it casually—who carry it into every room without apparent awareness that they're carrying it—are playing with fire. He states that when used excessively, gossip "blows back on excessively explosive users." Overstep and the group you were using gossip to build relationships with turns and administers exactly what you administered to others.
It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Ellwardt found that "active gossipers were inclined to lose 'good friends' first." Casual acquaintances hold on longer, as they have less to protect, but the people who let you in are the first to quietly recede.
The tragedy is that this reads, from the gossip-monger's perspective, as everyone becoming more distant and the world getting colder. But in actuality, the world just responded, quite rationally, to a pattern of behavior and made adjustments accordingly.
We usually do not lose trust dramatically. We lose it the way Hemingway described bankruptcy—gradually and then all at once. The gradual part is a long series of small recalibrations, each one invisible from the outside: a friend who stops mentioning her relationship problems, another who changes the subject when work comes up, a third who declines to explain why she moved and lets you fill in the blank yourself. Each one is rational. None of them announce themselves.
And then, at some point, the network has rearranged itself around you. The bridges still exist, and the warmth is still performed. But the good friends are gone, and you are surrounded by people who like you enough to stay but not enough to let you in consistently.
This is a preventable outcome.
Gluckman's "customary weapon" comes with an implied instruction manual: use with care, in the right rooms, in service of something other than yourself. Not because the etiquette police are watching, but because the mechanism by which gossip builds closeness is the same mechanism by which its excess destroys it. Trust is extended through disclosure, and it is withdrawn with evidence that you disclose too much.
The signal and its undoing are the same signal.
I think, more than anything else, the person who can't stop talking about everyone else is looking for the same thing the rest of us are—someone to let them in, someone to build something real with.
But the painful irony is that the strategy they've chosen is precisely what makes that impossible.
You cannot build a foundation out of other people's secrets. They belong to someone else. And eventually, everyone figures that out.