PSYCHOLOGISTS are studying the science of marital commitment, much to humanity’s relief. According to The New York Times:

 “.. it may not be feelings of love or loyalty that keep couples together. [ARE YOU SURPRISED?] Instead, scientists speculate that your level of commitment may depend on how much a partner enhances your life and broadens your horizons — a concept that Arthur Aron, a psychologist and relationship researcher at Stony Brook University, calls “self-expansion.”

There’s more:

“We enter relationships because the other person becomes part of ourselves, and that expands us,” Dr. Aron said. “That’s why people who fall in love stay up all night talking and it feels really exciting. We think couples can get some of that back by doing challenging and exciting things together.”

I suspect Dr. Aron does not include having and raising many children as “doing challenging and exciting things together.”

There’s something disturbing about the word “self-expansion,” leaving aside the obvious societal implications. It conjures images of bellows inserted into an orifice and gas pumped into the body. It makes me think of helium-inflated forms in the Thanksgiving Day parade, of the self, un-tethered and floating away, up, up, up into the atmosphere. Could you imagine being married to that?

                                   — Comments —

Drina writes:

I have to admit that the term is a turn-off to me as well. However, I immediately thought of the Greek myth (I first read it in Plato’s dialogues) about how one person used to be two “people” stuck together, back to back, each with a face facing the opposite direction. My memory is a bit fuzzy, but it seems like they angered the gods. For whatever reason, they were split apart, and afterward could not find wholeness except in another person: thus, we seek our “other half.” My first thought after reading your entry was, is this what they mean by self-expansion? It only took a few seconds to realize that probably the opposite is true. I think the Greek story bears a lot of truth, and even hints towards the Christian teaching of man finding himself by giving himself. “Self-expansion,” rather than showing that one is more complete in giving himself to another, gives the impression of getting more of himself without having to give of himself at all. Selfishness and self-absorption would be the motivation, and would result only in more selfishness and self-absorption. Yuck.

Laura writes:

In the comic myth presented by the playwright Aristophanes in The Symposium, human beings are split in two because they anger the gods. Love involves a sense of restoration when the other half is found. If humans don’t act with reverence and piety even when they are in love with their other half, they may be quartered.  Aristophanes says:

And, if we are not obedient to the gods, there is the danger that we shall be split up again and go about in basso-rilievo , like the profile figures having only half a nose which are sculptured on monuments, and that we shall be like tallies. Wherefore, let us exhort all men to piety, that we may avoid evil, and obtain the good, of which Love is to us the Lord and minister… For if we are friends of the God and at peace with him we shall fnd our own true loves, which rarely happens in this world at present. [The Symposium] 

I guess self-expansion could be understood as a broadening of the self, not necessarily a selfish thing, if Aron didn’t talk about commitment depending on what the other half does.

When did “scientists” become assumed authorities on marriage?

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