[acb-hsp] The Happy Marriage Is the "Me" Marriage

[peter altschul]

The New York Times

December 31, 2010

The Happy Marriage Is the 'Me' Marriage

By TARA PARKER-POPE

A lasting marriage does not always signal a happy marriage.  
Plenty of miserable couples have stayed together for children, 
religion or other practical reasons.

 But for many couples, it's just not enough to stay together.  
They want a relationship that is meaningful and satisfying.  In 
short, they want a sustainable marriage.

"The things that make a marriage last have more to do with 
communication skills, mental health , social support, stress -- 
those are the things that allow it to last or not," says Arthur 
Aron, a psychology professor who directs the Interpersonal 
Relationships Laboratory at the State University of New York at 
Stony Brook.  "But those things don't necessarily make it 
meaningful or enjoyable or sustaining to the individual."

 The notion that the best marriages are those that bring 
satisfaction to the individual may seem counterintuitive.  After 
all, isn't marriage supposed to be about putting the relationship 
first?

Not anymore.  For centuries, marriage was viewed as an economic 
and social institution, and the emotional and intellectual needs 
of the spouses were secondary to the survival of the marriage 
itself.  But in modern relationships, people are looking for a 
partnership, and they want partners who make their lives more 
interesting.

Caryl Rusbult, a researcher at Vrije University in Amsterdam who 
died last January, called it the "Michelangelo effect," referring 
to the manner in which close partners "sculpt" each other in ways 
that help each of them attain valued goals.

Dr.  Aron and Gary W.  Lewandowski Jr., a professor at Monmouth 
University in New Jersey, have studied how individuals use a 
relationship to accumulate knowledge and experiences, a process 
called "self-expansion." Research shows that the more 
self-expansion people experience from their partner, the more 
committed and satisfied they are in the relationship.

To measure this, Dr.  Lewandowski developed a series of questions 
for couples: How much has being with your partner resulted in 
your learning new things? How much has knowing your partner made 
you a better person?

While the notion of self-expansion may sound inherently 
self-serving, it can lead to stronger, more sustainable 
relationships, Dr.  Lewandowski says.

"If you're seeking self-growth and obtain it from your partner, 
then that puts your partner in a pretty important position," he 
explains.  "And being able to help your partner's self-expansion 
would be pretty pleasing to yourself."

The concept explains why people are delighted when dates treat 
them to new experiences, like a weekend away.  But self-expansion 
isn't just about exotic experiences.  Individuals experience 
personal growth through their partners in big and small ways.  It 
happens when they introduce new friends, or casually talk about a 
new restaurant or a fascinating story in the news.

The effect of self-expansion is particularly pronounced when 
people first fall in love.  In research at the University of 
California at Santa Cruz , 325 undergraduate students were given 
questionnaires five times over 10 weeks.  They were asked, "Who 
are you today?" and given three minutes to describe themselves.  
They were also asked about recent experiences, including whether 
they had fallen in love.

After students reported falling in love, they used more varied 
words in their self-descriptions.  The new relationships had 
literally broadened the way they looked at themselves.

"You go from being a stranger to including this person in the 
self, so you suddenly have all of these social roles and 
identities you didn't have before," explains Dr.  Aron, who 
co-authored the research.  "When people fall in love that happens 
rapidly, and it's very exhilarating."

Over time, the personal gains from lasting relationships are 
often subtle.  Having a partner who is funny or creative adds 
something new to someone who isn't.  A partner who is an active 
community volunteer creates new social opportunities for a spouse 
who spends long hours at work.

Additional research suggests that spouses eventually adopt the 
traits of the other -- and become slower to distinguish 
differences between them, or slower to remember which skills 
belong to which spouse.

In experiments by Dr.  Aron, participants rated themselves and 
their partners on a variety of traits, like "ambitious" or 
"artistic." A week later, the subjects returned to the lab and 
were shown the list of traits and asked to indicate which ones 
described them.

People responded the quickest to traits that were true of both 
them and their partner.  When the trait described only one 
person, the answer came more slowly.  The delay was measured in 
milliseconds, but nonetheless suggested that when individuals 
were particularly close to someone, their brains were slower to 
distinguish between their traits and those of their spouses.

"It's easy to answer those questions if you're both the same," 
Dr.  Lewandowski explains.  "But if it's just true of you and not 
of me, then I have to sort it out.  It happens very quickly, but 
I have to ask myself, 'Is that me or is that you?"

It's not that these couples lost themselves in the marriage; 
instead, they grew in it.  Activities, traits and behaviors that 
had not been part of their identity before the relationship were 
now an essential part of how they experienced life.

All of this can be highly predictive for a couple's long-term 
happiness.  One scale designed by Dr.  Aron and colleagues 
depicts seven pairs of circles.  The first set is side by side.  
With each new set, the circles begin to overlap until they are 
nearly on top of one another.  Couples choose the set of circles 
that best represents their relationship.  In a 2009 report in the 
journal Psychological Science , people bored in their marriages 
were more likely to choose the more separate circles.  Partners 
involved in novel and interesting experiences together were more 
likely to pick one of the overlapping circles and less likely to 
report boredom.  "People have a fundamental motivation to improve 
the self and add to who they are as a person," Dr.  Lewandowski 
says.  "If your partner is helping you become a better person, 
you become happier and more satisfied in the relationship."