Audit current relationships for expansion rate
Relationships that stopped expanding tend to feel stagnant — a periodic audit reveals where the growth has stopped.
Why it works
If self-expansion is a motivation, its absence will be experienced as malaise or a diffuse sense of stagnation without an obvious cause. Periodic audit — asking "what new perspective, capability, or experience has this relationship brought me in the past three months?" — surfaces expansion rate as a trackable variable. Low rate is not evidence of failure but a signal to redesign how the relationship is spent.
How to do it
- For each important relationship, ask: "Has this relationship expanded my sense of what is possible or who I am in the past few months?"
- If yes, identify what specifically produced the expansion and protect it.
- If no, ask whether the relationship has the ingredients for expansion or whether both parties are in a comfort-only mode.
- Design one expansion experiment for any relationship that scores low.
Evidence
The self-expansion model predicts that expansion rate predicts relationship satisfaction; this is supported across cross-sectional and longitudinal research in the Aron programme. (observational)
Most research is on romantic relationships; the audit application to friendships and professional relationships is a reasonable but less directly studied extension.
Common mistake
Concluding that a low-expansion relationship is a bad relationship — expansion rate is situational and modifiable, not an immutable property of the relationship.
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More practices for Self-Expansion Model: How Relationships Grow (and Stagnate) Us
- Do novel, moderately challenging activities together
New and slightly difficult shared experiences restore the self-expansion that keeps closeness alive.
- Practise including the other person in your self-concept
Close relationships develop when you genuinely incorporate the other’s perspectives and resources into how you think — not just spend time with them.
- Pursue personal growth that you share — not parallel but joint
Growing alongside a partner or friend, rather than separately, leverages the self-expansion mechanism for both people simultaneously.
- Use structured escalating self-disclosure to accelerate closeness
Closeness can be deliberately generated through mutual, gradually deepening disclosure — not just through time.
- Protect expansion by resisting the slide into pure comfort
Long relationships naturally slide toward comfort and predictability — expansion requires deliberate re-injection of novelty.
- Apply the self-expansion framework to individual growth, not only relationships
The same motivation that drives relational closeness also drives individual meaning — seeking growth for its own sake.