Arthur Aron
speaker
91 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Arthur Aron’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So I said, let's take a bicycle taxi and go out to lunch. Well, those are sort of scary in the heavy traffic. So they took the bicycle taxi. They arrived at the place they were going to have lunch, and they got off, and she said, oh, that taxi driver is so attractive.
Yes, right.
Yeah, I mean, it's only one of the causes of falling in love. I mean, there's other circumstances that can strongly create it, and we've done research on that.
Well, that's certainly what happens in a new relationship. But in an ongoing relationship, when you do it together, it's not so much that it's about my feelings about them. It's what we are.
Well, I think boredom has a big effect. If everything's going fine, fine, you know, we'll just stay together and enjoy raising our children or enjoy having our house together, you know, supporting each other. But we've shown that over time, if you're bored, you're less likely to, you know, to feel love or feel even closeness, as much closeness to your partner.
Well, they weren't interviewed in person. They did a questionnaire early on where they answered a bunch of different questions, three or four of which had to do with boredom. And then we gave them a questionnaire, I don't know, five years later, eight years later or something. that focused on closeness using our standard measure of closeness.
And those who had been more bored eight years earlier were likely to now to have less satisfaction.
Well, I think especially in our culture and in most modern cultures, you hope for more in a relationship. So if you're feeling bored, you're not getting everything you'd like from it.
Well, we've shown that there's a whole bunch of evolutionary work. One main evolutionary thing is survival. The other is growth, change, expansion, what we call expansion. You want to increase who you are, to increase your resources, increase your knowledge. And the other thing we've shown in our research is that when you form a relationship, the other becomes part of who you are.
Relationships are a major way that you can expand rapidly. So when you get close to someone, you include them in the self. And that means that you grow because you've included their resources, their knowledge, their experiences. So you grow. And when that happens at the beginning, it's a rapid expansion of the self. And it's very rewarding.
Over time, it's not that exciting anymore because it's not new expansion.
Well, yes, but they also become part of us. So their abilities and their resources, we actually mix up with our own. We've done a lot of research showing that we mix up memories, we mix up who has what qualities, all sorts of stuff. I sometimes think I know things my partner knows that I don't, or that sort of thing.
So you feel you know more than you did, you feel you have more resources than you did, all sorts of things.
Well, I think you want to be able to do more, to get more, to acquire more. It's just normal and natural and to explore and find new things that make life better. And so we're wired to have that, this idea of growth and, you know, wanting to know more, explore, all of that, seeking more. growth and expansion and creativity.
All of that is a long-term understanding and evolutionary psych, and it's well-documented.
Yes. If we have a partner who's got resources, that's kind of a plus. A partner who is socially valuable is a kind of a plus. A partner who knows a bunch of things is a kind of a plus. It's making us more than we were before. It's giving us more opportunities to do things we couldn't do before. It's not just money and resources. It's creativity.
It's opportunities to be able to do things, to feel things more broadly. All of those things we desire as individuals, we can get through a partner in some ways much more easily.
Mostly people think that similarity matters hugely. It doesn't matter that much. And in fact, overall, we do like to have differences. And we've shown that in the study, that if you think the other person has different interests than you do, and they're not competing with you, that's a plus.
So if you're interested in the arts and they're interested in science, you're going to each gain from each other.
Yes, we want to feel, we like to feel that sense of I'm going to be more now being with them. I'm going to have a fuller life. I'm going to have more opportunities, more knowledge, more interests, more ways to make life enjoyable and interesting. All of that stuff.
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