Five Ways to Grow in Your Relationship Together
Developing Flexibility and Openness in Close Relationships
Two weeks ago, I was writing Substack posts from a typical spot at the public library in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Today? The home office for the Shelburne Falls Coffee Roasters company, in the hopping town village of Shelburne Falls.
As I mentioned last week, Julia and I are in a season of transition as we reacclimate to life in the States. There’s a lot of steps to our readjustment process, including (but by no means limited to):
Opening a new business
Setting ourselves up for parenthood (most likely via adoption)
Driving 15 minutes to the grocery store instead of walking 5 minutes down the road.
Before we continue, we would love your financial support so we can continue to write about the relational and sexual health the church didn’t want you to have. Please subscribe, and consider donating:
While the process of transitioning is especially obvious for me and Julia as we try to figure out what time zones are bodies are in, the reality is, as we talked about Thursday, we navigate transitions every day.
Transitions confront a larger tension that we experience: the balance between familiarity (homeostasis) and evolution (morphogenesis, or the idea that the world around us is always changing, and therefore, we’re making adaptations to those changes).
Transitions become especially complicated when they involve relationships between two equal people with two differing personalities, paces, preferences, and needs. Julia and I concur that relationship therapy is helping couples more effectively navigate transitions between roles, spaces, and conversational topics. I wrote:
“Transitions require a high amount of flexibility and openness, something that our brains, whose primary goal is to keep us alive, often struggle with.”
Which leads us to today’s main question:
How do you develop the skills of flexibility and openness?
Renowned relationship researchers Arthur and Elaine Aron give us some answers in their Self-Expansion Model of Motivation and Cognition in Close Relationships. For the full context check out their chapter in the 2013 Oxford Handbook of Close Relationships, which they co-wrote with Gary Lewandowski and Debra Mashek.
The Self Expansion Model includes two principles, which will be explored in greater detail:
The motivational principle. People have an innate motive to expand their capacity.
The inclusion-of-other-in-the-self principle. In a close relationship (i.e. a partnership), the resources, perspectives, and preferences of the other become experienced as one’s own (to some extent).
The Motivational Principle
One of my favorite parts of the model is Aron’s model high view of human nature; he believes that people have both the capacity and desire to explore and pursue new, generative, creative perspectives, identities, and resources. After all, the more resources you have, the more likely you are to tend to and achieve your goals. While financial resources are the most commonly named forms of privilege, Aron notes other forms of currency:
Knowledge and education
Social status
Community support
Physical strength and/or beauty
Health
The Arons observe that self-expansion happens in two primary ways:
Directly gaining new resources and perspectives. They note that the rapid or intense accrual of these forms of currency can be especially motivating.
Participating in new, creative, or challenging activities, so long as they are not highly overwhelming or stressful.
The early stages of close relationships are the most noted times that people experience high levels of motivation; however, the Arons describe the importance for couples in long-term relationships to develop novel, creative, and/or challenging experiences:
“A relationship can produce the experience of self-expansion based on the partner’s ability to be particularly interesting and expanding, through the partner's support of individual self-expansion, or through the partners engaging together in activities that can lead to self-expansion or the kind of excited engagement typically experienced with rapid self-expansion” (p. 95).
On Thursday, we invited you to develop a 5-10 minute window at the beginning and end of the work day to check in with your partner. While the Arons support sharing time together, they also remind us that there is likely little benefit to the relationship if a couple spends time together in the same way every time.
Healthy partnerships find ways to attain new, novel experiences and resources both inside and outside of the relationship. The Arons explain:
“Ongoing relationships, in addition to benefiting from shared self-expanding activities, are also predicted to benefit from partner’s support from one’s own self-expansion, due both to perceiving the partner as facilitating one’s expansion, and to associating the partner with that expansion” (p. 98)
As we’ve described before, relational health is about managing the distance between two people more than it is about creating closeness. While this seems counterintuitive, especially for folks who learned relationship models that suggest “the two shall become one”, eroticism, self-expansion, and other forms of relational energy develop from two people being their different, independent people and coming back together. The second principle explores how two people can come back together in a meaningful way.
Inclusion-of-Other-in-the-Self Principle
In close relationships, the resources, perspectives, and goals of the other person are experienced as your own, to some extent.
While we like to think of ourselves as independent, individual people, which the growing wellness industry reinforces through language like “Just set those boundaries”, the reality is that we construct our own sense of self through relationships with others, both through the experiences within the relationship itself, and the resources that you and the other person both bring into the relationship.
The Arons summarize what it means to think and operate relationally:
“People in close relationships act for the benefit of the other because the other’s outcomes (good or bad) are to some extent directly experienced as one’s own outcomes” (p. 102).
They describe three primary ways that relationships can practice including others in the self:
The frequent sharing in exciting, novel activities.
Self-disclosure
Empathy, or actively taking the perspective of the other.
Relationship 101
I want to say a quick word about privilege. When I talk with couples about self-expansion and the accrual of new experiences, many folks freak out, through the underlying question, “How am I going to pay for this?” After all, capitalism links the accrual of new resources with purchasing power.
The Arons attempt to get around this by focusing strictly on conversations. Aron invites people who are exploring a long-term partnership to consider 36 questions. Please download this document, and take 5-10 minutes each day for the next six weeks to talk about one of these questions, some of which include:
What would constitute a perfect day for you?
If you could change anything about the way that you were raised, what would it be?
What do you value most in a friendship?
In an interview with Warren Burger, author of the book A More Beautiful Question, Arthur Aron shares:
“First, just by asking, you’re showing that you care about the other person. Second, the question encourages that person to reveal something about themselves. And then that creates an opportunity for you to respond to what they are revealing.”
Also, for the sports fans, I highly recommend checking out Griffin Antle’s article “The 36 Questions That Lead to Buckets” at
. Hilarious, especially for the basketball junkies in your life.The 36 questions only speaks to what John Gottman calls “cognitive room”. As we talked about in an earlier podcast, cognitive room, or information about a person’s preferences, goals, dreams, and values, is the foundation of a healthy relationship.
If you’d like guidance in developing self-expansion, and the skills of curiosity, creativity, and novelty, Julia and I would love to help.
We offer relationship coaching nationwide, with a special interest in couples where one or both partner grew up in a religious environment. We both offer free 30 minute consultations to see how we might work best together:
Let’s heal together!
Jeremiah and Julia