Why did some conversations unfurl and others wilt? One answer, I realized, may be the clash of take-and-take vs. give-and-take. 

That’s why when psychologists want to jump-start friendship in the lab, they have participants answer a series of questions that require steadily escalating amounts of self-disclosure (you may have seen this as “The 36 Questions that Lead to Love”).

Weber left home and lived in poverty while working as a street-corner evangelist and social activist for two years with the evangelical Church Army Workers, an organization similar to the Salvation Army, preaching and singing hymns on street corners and singing and playing the organ in rescue missions in red-light districts in Pittsburgh and New York,[13][33] until the Church Army Workers disbanded in 1900.