Sustainable Marriage

In my day job, I think a lot about what makes business sustainable - in other words, how does a company set itself up for success not just in the short term, but over the long term as well. In business this means everything from reducing your environmental impact to charting steady (though not always aggressive) growth.

The phrase Sustainable Marriage is starting to circulate, thanks to NYT columnist Tara Parker- Pope. Borrowing from marriage researchers, Parker-Pope argues that marriages that last happily (that are sustainable) are marriages that - like business - chart steady growth.

What does that look like in a committed relationship? Well - it turns out that happy, lasting marriages are ones where the couples are continually growing as individuals. To quote Parker-Pope:

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 called “self-expansion.” Research shows that the more self-expansion people experience from their partner, the more committed and satisfied they are in the relationship.

You can take a quiz to test your own relationship's self-expansion value.

Never one to let a pop-science quiz pass me by, I grabbed a scrap of paper and quickly tallied my score: 60. I patted myself on the back a bit for this, "Good on us ... we've got a modestly self-expansive relationship." I thought. Not bad, especially for a couple whose daily interactions center most frequently on the kid's ear infections and bowel movements.

Then the panic set in: what if my husband's score was lower - significantly lower - than mine? What would it say about me as a person, or about our marriage? (Incidentally, a friend shared this article with me ... and she said she went through the same period of panic while waiting for her husband to take the test.)

Turns out (in both cases) that our husbands scored near-ish to our own scores. No cause for concern.

Though Parker-Pope's column didn't mention this, I suspect a relationship's capacity for self-expansion (at least in dramatic ways) is somewhat cyclical. Certain seasons of life make exceptional growth, grand acts of expansion, nearly impossible: when is there time for pursuing a wild new idea when it's always time to head out for the car pool?

One thing I notice in my husband, Cliff, is that even in the times when I'm least actively pursuing my long term goals, he still believes they are tangibly possible for me. It's what attracted me to him in the first place - I can clearly recall an early note from him where he said, "Your dreams are becoming my own." It may seem pie-in-the-sky, but I believe I'm more likely to reach my grandest goals because I have the daily support of someone who believes I'm worthy of them.

Marriage and business do have a lot in common: they share considerations of financial stability, long term projections for growth, and daily development of our products (in the case of our marriage, that would be our kids). Sustainable is what I'm going for ... and from now on, self-expansion will be one metric on my marriage dashboard.