It’s hard enough to make it through a week, never mind a new year, of good intentions.The problem is often with the goals themselves: Be loving to your spouse. Eat better. Stay within your budget. Easy to say, but hard to do. So here is a guide to making those resolutions last.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY HEADS OF STATE
LOVE
In Marriage, Growth of One Benefits Both
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 livesmore interesting.
In the Best Marriages,
The Individual Grows
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 them attain 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 they call “self-expansion.” Research shows that the more self-expansion people experience , the more satisfied they are in the relationship.
Dr. Lewandowski developed a series of questions : How much has being with your partner resulted in your learning new things? How much has knowing your partner made you a better person?
Self-expansion can lead to 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 . Individuals grow with their partners’
help 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 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, an author of 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.
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.
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.”
By TARA PARKER-POPE
