After savoring a good experience, we often want to share it. We want someone to hear a song we love or a sentence that has stayed with us. I call this impulse overflow. Why does a feeling of personal fulfillment turn toward another person?
Savoring reaches beyond individual satisfaction. When an experience enriches us, we can become more attentive to others and more eager to share what we found good. A personal experience becomes something we experience in relationship. Why does fulfillment lead us outward, and what does sharing it change in us?
Inadequacy holds on; fulfillment gives
Begin with inadequacy. A person who feels they do not have enough holds on tightly. They try to acquire more and protect what they have from being taken. The mind contracts inward. This is not necessarily a flaw in character. It is a basic response to threat. Someone who feels under threat has little attention left for those beside them. Protecting themselves takes all their strength.
Fulfillment moves in the opposite direction. A person who feels secure and enriched notices others. They see something good and want to share it; they are deeply moved and want to tell someone. This is not always a deliberate decision. A body that feels safe can naturally reach outward. Research has found that people who feel emotionally secure are more responsive to others' difficulties, more willing to help, and more readily compassionate. Someone who feels unsafe within has less capacity to care for others. Our capacity to care becomes available when we feel safe.1
Sometimes a person cannot share not because they are unkind, but because they have nothing left to give. An empty cup pours nothing, however far we tip it. A person who has enough within can overflow without forcing it.
What we pass to the people around us
Whether we notice it or not, we pass something of our inner lives to the people beside us: what we have savored, or what we feel we lack.
Most of us know someone who has no extraordinary possessions, yet makes life feel more generous when we are with them. They notice something good and tell us about it. Small things delight them, and they share that delight. The world seems richer in their company. It is not because they own so much. It is because they savor what they encounter. What has developed within them keeps finding its way into their relationships.
We know the opposite, too. Beside someone who always feels inadequate, we can begin to contract as well. Their inward withdrawal affects others, often without their realizing it. The habit of finding fault, assessing everyone, and comparing everything spreads to the person nearby. We pass the feeling of our inner lives to one another. Overflow need not mean some grand act of generosity. It can simply be the transmission of what is already within us. A person who feels enriched offers that richness to others. A person who feels inadequate may withdraw into themselves while unintentionally passing on their unease.
Look at that
Why do we tug at someone's sleeve when we see something good? Why does a beautiful sunset, or a song we love, make us so eager to tell the person beside us?
Putting an experience into my own words helps me understand and remember it more clearly. But words have another quality: they are not meant only for the person saying them. From the beginning, language turns toward a listener. By the time a savored experience becomes a sentence, it is already ready to be shared. When I found the words to say that sunlight tasted sweet, I could hardly wait to tell someone. A sentence calls for someone to hear it.
"Look at that" is the smallest act of overflow. Nothing grand has been bestowed. A savored experience became words, and those words naturally turned toward someone nearby. This is why people who savor deeply keep finding things to say to others. Once an experience has matured into language, it wants to be shared.
The self grows through others
There is one more part to this. Overflow does not only enrich someone else. As it happens, I become more than I was.
People have a longstanding drive to expand who they are. We learn new things, visit unfamiliar places, and come to know other people. Through these experiences, our sense of self develops. And other people offer one of the greatest possibilities for that expansion.
The psychologists Arthur Aron and Elaine Aron at Stony Brook University have devoted much of their work to this question. They proposed that one fundamental reason people form relationships is to expand the self. As we come to know someone deeply, their way of seeing becomes part of our own, and their knowledge of the world enters ours. They called this including the other in the self and measured it using drawings of overlapping circles. Participants chose how much the circles representing themselves and another person overlapped. Greater reported overlap predicted more lasting relationships. The measure is not limited to romantic partners; it is also used to assess closeness between parents and children, and between longstanding friends.
This is more than an appealing description. In a study by the Arons and their colleagues, students repeatedly described who they were over the course of a semester. Those who developed a deep romantic relationship came to describe themselves in more varied and expansive terms. They included interests, abilities, and aspects of themselves that had not been there before. Through the relationship, their sense of self had grown. The perspective of someone we know closely becomes available to us. A relationship may seem to involve giving ourselves to someone else, but it is also a way of becoming more through another person.2
The self expands through exchange, rather than through accumulation. When something that has matured within me reaches another person and develops again within them, I exist beyond the boundaries of my body. Overflow is that moment. As what I share reaches someone else, they also become part of me. Giving and receiving are two sides of the same process. Together, they allow me to become more than I could alone. Overflow is not a loss that makes me smaller. It is a way of growing.
Savoring helps us recognize more clearly what moves us and what we value. Sharing the experience with someone else also opens us to perspectives we could not have found alone. It deepens us within and expands us through relationships. Depth and breadth are two directions of a single process.
A fulfilled mind turns outward without being forced into altruism or told it has a duty. We want to share a good experience, and in sharing it we also discover how someone else thinks and feels. Sharing what we have savored expands our own lives as well. Savoring becomes more than private satisfaction: it is a way of enriching a life together with other people.
Notes
[1] Attachment research has repeatedly found that emotionally secure people tend to respond more sensitively and compassionately to others' suffering. Mario Mikulincer and Phillip Shaver (2005) describe secure attachment as supporting the caregiving system, while insecurity, threat, and self-protection can inhibit it. The contrast in this essay between inadequacy drawing people inward and fulfillment allowing them to reach outward draws on that observation. ↩
[2] Arthur Aron and Elaine Aron's self-expansion model proposes that close relationships broaden the self by incorporating another person's perspectives, resources, and identities. See Love and the Expansion of Self (1986). Aron, Paris, and Aron (1995), in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, studied changes in students' self-concepts over a semester and found greater diversity and expansion among those who fell in love. The overlapping-circle measure, Inclusion of Other in the Self, was introduced by Aron, Aron, and Smollan (1992), in the same journal, volume 63, issue 4. It measures closeness across many kinds of relationships, including partners, family members, and friends. ↩