Does Your Relationship Make You Grow?
New experiences, shared adventures, and whether you are still fully yourself
One of the best-supported ideas in relationship science is that people fall for, and stay with, partners who make them bigger: more experiences, more skills, a wider view of the world. The same research explains why long relationships can go flat - the growth slows - and what tends to bring it back. This test looks at how much you are growing through your relationship, how much newness you share, and whether any part of you has shrunk along the way.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about your current relationship. If you are single, answer about your most recent one as it was towards the end.
What it measures
Self-expansion through your partner (new experiences, skills and perspectives), shared novelty (how often you do new and challenging things together) and keeping yourself (the opposite of self-contraction, where parts of you fade). The partner maintenance and investment tests on this site measure effort and commitment; this one measures whether the relationship is making you grow.
Based on: Self-expansion model (Aron & Aron, 1986) and Self-Expansion Questionnaire (Lewandowski & Aron)
Possible results
Growth through your partner
How much the relationship has added experiences, skills and perspectives to who you are.
Shared novelty
How often you and your partner do new or challenging things together.
Keeping yourself
Whether you have kept your own interests and sense of self, rather than shrinking into the couple.
Common questions
What is self-expansion in a relationship?
It is the idea, developed by Arthur and Elaine Aron in the 1980s, that people are motivated to grow - to gain new resources, perspectives and identities - and that close relationships are one of the main ways they do it. Falling in love feels exhilarating partly because the self expands quickly; relationships feel rewarding later to the extent that the growth continues.
Why do long relationships lose their spark?
Self-expansion theory offers one answer: early on, everything about the other person is new, so you grow fast; once you know each other well, that growth slows and the relationship can feel flat even when nothing is wrong. Experiments in which couples did novel, mildly challenging activities together found improvements in how satisfied they felt, which suggests the spark is partly a matter of shared newness.
Is it normal to lose yourself in a relationship?
Some reshaping is normal - you trade some time and habits for a shared life. What researchers call self-contraction is different: losing positive parts of yourself, such as interests, confidence or friendships, without gaining much in return. It is associated with lower satisfaction, and it is usually easier to reverse early, by reclaiming one specific thing, than after years of drift.
Sources
- Aron, A., & Aron, E. N. (1986). Love and the expansion of self: Understanding attraction and satisfaction. Hemisphere (New York).
- Aron, A., Norman, C. C., Aron, E. N., McKenna, C., & Heyman, R. E. (2000). Couples' shared participation in novel and arousing activities and experienced relationship quality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.78.2.273
- Mattingly, B. A., Lewandowski, G. W., & McIntyre, K. P. (2014). 'You make me a better/worse person': A two-dimensional model of relationship self-change. Personal Relationships. doi:10.1111/pere.12025
- Aron, A., Lewandowski, G., Branand, B., Mashek, D., & Aron, E. (2022). Self-expansion motivation and inclusion of others in self: An updated review. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. doi:10.1177/02654075221110630
An honest note The items are Quinthea's own wording adapted from the Self-Expansion Questionnaire, so scores are not comparable to published results. That questionnaire is widely used but was never published as a fully validated scale. Only the first bar corresponds to it; shared novelty and keeping yourself are related constructs from the same research programme, not factors of it. Most studies involve young American couples, and much of the evidence is correlational.
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