Self-Expansion Theory

Self-Expansion Theory Definition

Close relationships open up new worlds to people. As you interact with roommates, close
friends, and relationship partners in college, you will probably start to notice small parts of
yourself changing to become a little more like them and vice versa. For example, you might
notice that you start taking more interest in sports if you have a partner who always watches
basketball and football games on television. Before you know it, you might think of yourself as a
sports buff!

Self-Expansion Theory

Relationships can help shape our identities, and they can provide us with shared resources. If
your partner owns a car and you do not, you will likely occasionally get a ride to get groceries or
go out to dinner. Or if you have a nicer apartment than your partner’s, he or she will likely
benefit by spending more time at your place. Besides developing a sense of ourselves and
receiving extra resources, we can also develop different perspectives from close relationships.
For example, if your partner is from a small town in the Midwest and you are from a large East
Coast city, you will likely learn a lot about each other’s worldviews just by interacting and
talking.

These changes to people’s identities, resources, and perspectives that occur in relationships are
described in and explained by self-expansion theory. Self-expansion theory says that it is very
important for people’s sense of self to expand and grow throughout their lives for them to feel
satisfied with their lives. Although close relationships can provide us with a rich source of
potential expansion, people can experience this type of growth in other ways: through
spirituality, creativity, and their interactions with valued objects.

People really enjoy the feeling of self-expansion, and as a result, they try very hard to look for
self-expansive opportunities. People can do this in various ways. For example, some people
might look for new relationships to keep the positive feeling of growth alive, whereas others
might instead try new activities with current relationship partners as a way to increase their
self-expansion.

Self-Expansion Theory Background and History

The motivation to self-expand is tied to people’s ability to accomplish their goals, thus self-
expansion is related to psychological models of self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, self-
actualization, and the self-improvement motivation. The idea that the self is created through
relationships with close others goes back to Martin Buber’s conception of the “Thou” and “I”
uniting and is also related to George Herbert Mead’s work on social interactions. Carl Jung
believed that relationship partners could draw out otherwise hidden aspects of the self to
create greater wholeness, and Abraham Maslow thought that loved ones could be included in
people’s self-concepts. Within social psychology, Fritz Heider’s concept of the unit relation that
can form between close others comes closest to Art and Elaine Aron’s recent idea of inclusion
of others in the self.

Love

Passionate love has been defined as an ‘‘intense longing for union with another’’ (Hatfield &
Rapson, 1993, p. 5). It is understood to be an emotionally volatile state characterized by strong
attraction, an attraction that brings elation when reciprocated but that is cause for despair
when rejected. People experiencing passionate love may be obsessed with their partner,
experiencing intrusive thoughts and fantasies that distract them from everything else (Tennov,
1979). Although passionate love often includes a sexual longing, sex is not its sole focus (Fisher,
2000; Myers & Bersheid, 1997).

Companionate love, in contrast, is the ‘‘deep affection toward someone with whom your life is
intertwined’’ (Hatfield & Rapson, 1993, p. 9). It is the love of close friends who have a genuine
concern for each other (Grote & Frieze, 1994). Built on intimacy and trust, companionate love is
more prototypical of love than is passion (Fehr, 1994). Whereas passionate love is ‘‘hot’’ and
arousing, the flames of a fire that move and shift in unpredictable ways, companionate love is
‘‘warm’’ and comforting, the embers of a fire that remain through the night (Hatfield & Rapson,
1993)

Self-Expansion Theory Research Evidence

One of the most common ways that humans self-expand is through their relationships with
others. In relationships, people can feel distant and completely different from the other person,
or they can feel a close sense of oneness called psychological overlap. Psychological overlap
with close others is measured with the Inclusion of Other in the Self Scale, which is a set of
seven pairs of circles with gradually increasing levels of overlap. Participants are asked to select
the pair of circles that most represents their relationship.

This scale measures both feelings of closeness and behaviors related to closeness. Psychological
overlap as measured by this scale is strongly related to relationship satisfaction, commitment,
relationship investment and importance, and the percentage that dating partners use the
pronouns we and us when discussing their relationship. This scale also predicts whether people
stay in a relationship in a 3-month posttest.
According to research, the idea that the self expands through relationships can be taken
literally. For example, people in close relationships describe their self-concepts with more
complexity do than those who are not in close relationships. As well, people who report falling
in love describe themselves with more different domains of self-content compared with their
baseline “not in love” state and compared with those who are not in love.

Relationships high in self-other overlap are characterized by expanded identities, resources,

and perspectives from the relationship partner. When the self expands to include another,
people may even confuse their own personality traits and memories with close others’ traits
and memories. Identity and self-knowledge literally overlap with a highly overlapped other.

Self-Expansion Theory Implications

Self-expansion theory can help provide explanations for both people’s initial attraction to
others and the eventual decline in relationship satisfaction that occurs over time. It suggests
that one of the main reasons people initially enter romantic relationships is because of the
opportunity to self-expand and that attraction is the result of a nonconscious calculation of how
much the potential partner can contribute to one’s self-expansion. Extremely high levels of
relationship satisfaction that typically occur at the beginning of a relationship are explained by
positive feelings resulting from self-expansion, which quickly fade as the two people get to
know each other better and opportunities for self-expansion decline. Importantly, the model
specifies why relationship satisfaction declines over time and how to increase relationship
satisfaction. This has been successfully done in the laboratory through inducing couples to
participate in self-expanding activities together (e.g., completing a difficult maze) and in real life
by asking couples to spend time doing exciting things together (e.g., learning to dance).

Conclusion

It is commonly believed that passionate love diminishes over time even as companionate love
may grow. According to the self-expansion model (Aron and Aron (1986) Love and the
expansion of the self: Understanding attraction and satisfaction. New York, NY: Hemisphere
Publishing Co/Harper & Row Publishers), this change may reflect changes in opportunities for
self-expansion in the relationship. Early in relationships, as partners continuously learn new
things about each other, self-expansion—which occurs through the integration of the qualities
and characteristics of the partner into oneself—generates passion for one’s partner. Later, as
one’s partner is completely included in the self, selfexpansion opportunities diminish and less
passion is generated. From this perspective, if self-expansion could be sustained, so could
passionate love. Over 500 adults in a Midwestern community responded to a telephone survey
about their romantic relationship. They answered questions about the length of their
relationship, experiences of selfexpansion within their relationship, passionate love—including
both romantic and obsessive components—and companionate love. As expected, people in
longer lasting relationships reported lower levels of self-expansion within their relationships.
Romantic and obsessive components of passionate love showed different patterns across time
in relationship, but both were positively associated with self-expansion experiences as expected
by the model. Self-expansion was unrelated to companionate love. Broadly consistent with the
self-expansion model, these findings highlight a need for further theoretical development to
explain the specific linkages of self-expansion with different components of passion.

References:

Aron, A., & Aron, E. (1997). Self-expansion motivation and including other in the self. In S. Duck
(Ed.), Handbook of personal relationships (2nd ed., pp. 251-270). Chichester, UK: Wiley.

Aron, A., McLaughlin-Volpe, T., Mashek, D., Lewandowski, G., Wright, S., & Aron, E. (2004).
Including others in the self. European Review of Social Psychology, 15, 101-132.

Aron, A., Norman, C., & Aron, E. (1998). The self-expansion model and motivation.
Representative Research in Social Psychology, 22, 1-13.