Couples Tied at the Wrist and Ankle: What Self-Expansion Theory Says About Shared Novelty

Picture a psychology lab. A couple is fastened together at the wrist and ankle with Velcro. Their job is to crawl across an obstacle, carrying a pillow between them without using their hands, arms or teeth. They bump, topple and start again. The whole thing takes about seven minutes.

That scene comes from a set of experiments by Arthur Aron, Christina Norman, Elaine Aron, Colin McKenna and Richard Heyman, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2000. Couples who did the awkward, novel task reported bigger gains in relationship quality than couples given a mundane one. The finding is the best-known piece of evidence for a bigger idea about why new experiences feel like life getting larger.

What is self-expansion theory?

Self-expansion theory holds that people are motivated to enlarge the self, meaning to gain perspectives, skills, identities and resources that make more goals reachable. Arthur and Elaine Aron set out the model in their 1986 book Love and the Expansion of Self. Their claim is that close relationships are a main route to expansion, because we absorb some of another person’s viewpoints and abilities into our own sense of who we are.

The practical reading is simple. A stretch of life where nothing is added to you can feel flat even when nothing is wrong. Learning, new places and new people each add something, and the model says that adding is a large part of what excitement is.

What did the couples experiments find?

Aron and colleagues used several methods in the 2000 paper: a newspaper questionnaire, a door-to-door survey and three laboratory experiments. In the surveys, couples who reported more shared exciting activities reported better relationships, and relationship boredom helped explain the link. An earlier paper by Reissman, Aron and Bergen (1993, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships) had already pitted self-expansion against boredom as explanations for why shared activities relate to marital satisfaction.

In the lab, couples attempted either the Velcro obstacle task or a mundane ball-rolling task, both for about seven minutes. Reports of the results, including the Greater Good Science Center’s summary, say the exciting group showed larger gains in relationship quality, and a no-activity comparison suggested the novel, arousing task itself was responsible. Couples in the exciting condition also showed less hostility and more support while discussing afterward. Sample sizes are not quoted here because the paper’s full text was not available for checking.

Why would shared novelty beat routine?

Routine keeps a relationship stable, but it adds little. The boredom mediation in the surveys is the telling detail: the shared activities were not just pleasant, they appeared to reduce the sense that the relationship had gone stale.

The second ingredient is that the new thing happens together. The model says some of the expansion you feel gets attached to the other person, so the same trip taken alone would not do the same relational work. This is an inference from the theory, and the 2000 lab studies, which used couples, did not test solo versus shared directly.

Arousal matters too. A familiar dinner out is pleasant. A task where you might topple a partner holds attention, raises your pulse and gives you a story. Whether it is the novelty, the arousal or the laughter doing the work is not separated in these studies.

What does this mean for fun things to do with friends?

The couples work does not prove anything about friend groups, so take this as a way to choose, not a result. If you want a night that feels bigger than the usual dinner, look for activities with three features: something unfamiliar, a little physical or uncertain, and a shared goal that needs two or more people.

Examples with that shape include an overnight microadventure after work, a structured questions-and-games evening built around Aron’s own closeness procedure, or a group singing night. None of these has been tested head to head against a Velcro obstacle course, which is the main caveat.

There is a rival view worth holding next to this one. Kierkegaard argued that the cure for boredom is changing how you attend to things, not piling up new things, and his rotation method is a fair counterweight to a novelty-chasing reading of Aron.

How do you keep the new things from staying ideas?

The failure point for most plans like these is scheduling, not imagination. The overnight, the odd class and the strange restaurant stay on a list because nobody is expected to show up at a given time.

Visibility changes that. A friend-witnessed commitment turns a vague intention into something that happens at a set hour, and that is where DontSnooze fits: if the plan is a sunrise hike, an alarm that asks you to show your friends you are actually up makes the 5:30 a.m. start harder to quietly abandon. The theory supplies the reason to do the new thing, and the logistics decide whether it happens.

Self-expansion theory, then, gives a modest and testable rule for a livelier life: add something unfamiliar that you do with someone else, and let it be a little uncomfortable.

For the memory side of an exciting life, the peak-end rule explains why one deliberate high point and a planned ending matter more than a packed schedule. For the friend side, a thank-you message you have been putting off is a cheap way to reopen contact.