This Valentine’s day, I thought we could explore a study on relationships and well-being. Close relationships in general are an important aspect of maintaining positive mental health, and moreover, they can impact a person’s identity, happiness, and life satisfaction. They provide a certain level of social support that we all need to help us overcome insecurities and open up to growth opportunities. Actively seeking out close relationships with people you care about (even if it’s not romantic!) may actually be great for your mental health.

Committed romantic relationships can be a large contributor to well-being in many peoples’ lives, and it has been shown in past studies to decrease incidence of mental health problems and depression. Break ups then, understandably, can have a negative effect on a person’s well-being. In fact, studies show that break ups increase emotional destress and can even contribute to an earlier death. A recent 2022 study by McIntyre et al explores this idea of relationships and mental health by focusing on the specific concept of self-expansion. 

You know when two of your friends in a relationship seem to slowly become the same person over time? Well, self-expansion may be playing a role in that process. Self-expansion is a process people use to add new or augment existing positive self-concepts. This means people in self-expanding relationships can be more motivated to increase their ability in achieving goals by introducing new traits, perspectives, resources and skills into their lives. In the context of romantic relationships, partners can share similar mental processes and identities with each other, or they can build individual self-expansion by sharing exciting activities with their partner. McIntyre et al takes this previously known information and measures a specific mental health trait, depression, in couples with different levels of self-expansion. 

This paper uses around 200 participants, and accounts for factors such as gender, age, and relationship length. Notably, 76% of participants were of European descent, potentially limiting the conclusions of this study to that population. Higher levels of self-expansion were associated with fewer depression symptoms for couples in both short term and long term relationships. Age also played a minor role in predicting depressive symptoms, but gender and relationship length had no effect, implying that self-expansion is a key aspect of maintaining well-being in most relationships. Dysfunctional attitudes were also associated with more depressive symptoms, while understanding self-concept was associated with less depressive symptoms.

The results of this study overall show that people with good self-expantion within their relationships have fewer symptoms of depression and better mental health functioning over time. Mclntyre et al highlight the importance of focusing on positive self-expansion to foster good long term mental health for both you and your partner. Maybe becoming more alike as time goes on isn’t such a bad thing, as long as it contributes positively to your self-concept.

Graphic: Anna Do