The time I used humor to reduce uncertainty

    Humor is not only something people can feel, express, or find in their daily lives but it is also something people can use when starting new relationships. Starting new relationships can be difficult and scary since it requires people to get to know one another more personally. During these situations people tend to have a lot of uncertainty about each other and about what they share with one another. This uncertainty, however, can be reduced with humor since people can use it to open up a door in their new relationships to allow for more transparency between the people in those relationships.

    Using humor to reduce uncertainty in new relationships is something I recall doing when I was on my high school drill team. Every year we had some new girls join the team and during the summer we had practices and team building activities to get to know one another. I particularly remember that we could not do these things as a full team during COVID-19 and instead did them by squads, which were smaller groups of people that our team was broken up into. There was one specific time when I got together with the squad I was put into, and my team director had older team members like me partner up with newer team members so that we could bond with them and help them improve their skills. When this happened, I was partnered with a girl who seemed like a nice and fun person. To help her improve her skills I had to demonstrate how to do them, observe if she could replicate them correctly, and point out the ones she needed to improve on. Doing this was very awkward since we were both uncertain about each other, but she may have been more uncertain about me since she probably thought that I was judging her in my mind. I especially noticed that she felt this way when she nervously kept asking me if she was doing the skills okay and because she would try to justify herself when she could not get them right. When sensing her uncertainty and nervousness I used humor to lightly joke about how bad my skills were when I had first started and my team director who was near us further added onto my humor by saying that I had greatly improved, which lastly eased the uncertainty between us by providing my teammate with some background information about me, by making us more comfortable about the situation, and by later allowing us to create a closer relationship as teammates.

    On a final note, the personal example I shared above provides an overview of how I was able to reduce the uncertainty between my teammate and I by using humor. Such an example additionally highlights that humor is certainly an effective way to reduce uncertainty within new relationships. People, however, must be mindful of the humor they use since not doing so can possibly lead to problems in their new relationships.