What if you were told that you were comparable to an onion? Not something cool like a tiger or exciting like a lightning bolt, but a plain old, smelly onion. That is exactly what Altman and Taylor compared people to when they established the Social Penetration Theory in 1973. They said people were like onions. They have many layers and with each peeled layer, you get deeper into the onion. The outer layer contains details that people are willing to share with people they first meet. This can be a thing like your sex, age, hair color, and height. Only through peeling back the layers, can people discover the deeper information. It is weird to consider yourself like an onion, but it many ways it is true. There are certain layers that we don’t want anyone to get to, that is why they are at the deepest core of the onion. Those deepest desires or fears or dreams are only shared with people you really trust. There is no greater treasure than being the person who can be confided in. If you don’t know if you are that person, ask yourself how much you know about your friends, roommates, spouse, or family. It is a start if you know a lot of things about a person, which is also referred to as breadth. What really counts is the depth of what you know. If your friends peels back all his or her layers for you and lets you in to their inner core, that is when you really know that person. So next time you look at an onion and just see a plain old, smelly sphere of layers, think of what might be under those layers and how great it would be to find out what lies beneath.