Couples Who Try New Things Together Stay Closer, Study Finds

In a 2000 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Arthur Aron and four co-authors had married couples spend just seven minutes doing something faintly absurd together. Partners were tied wrist to wrist and ankle to ankle, then asked to crawl across a gym mat with a pillow held between their bodies, around a barrier, and back. Couples who did that ridiculous obstacle course reported a meaningful jump in relationship quality afterward compared with couples who spent the same seven minutes rolling a ball back and forth.¹

The finding has held up for a quarter century. Doing something new and slightly arousing with your partner, even for a few minutes, appears to nudge couples closer in a way that doing something familiar does not. The mechanism researchers point to is called self-expansion, and the broader story it tells about long-term love is more useful than most date-night advice you have ever read.³

What is self-expansion, in plain terms?

Self-expansion theory was first proposed by Arthur and Elaine Aron in the 1980s and has since been tested in dozens of labs. The basic claim is that humans have a built-in motivation to grow: to add capabilities, perspectives, identities, and resources to the self. New relationships are powerful because, early on, a partner is a fast way to expand. You inherit their friends, their hobbies, their way of seeing the world. Falling in love can feel like the self enlarging in a few weeks.³

Then the expansion slows. After a few years, you have absorbed most of what your partner has to offer in that immediate way. The relationship still matters, but the felt sense of growth flattens. Boredom is the symptom of that flattening. The fix, in this model, is not to find a more interesting partner. It is to keep doing things together that expand the joint self: new skills, new places, new challenges that you struggle through and figure out side by side.³

Why a silly seven-minute task moved the needle

Aron’s 2000 study did not stop at one experiment. The paper reports a field study and three laboratory experiments. In the field study, married couples kept diaries about their shared activities, and the more often they reported doing things they rated as “exciting,” the higher their relationship quality climbed across a ten-week period. The lab experiments then tested whether the effect was causal by randomly assigning couples to the obstacle-course-style task or a mundane control task. Couples in the novel-and-arousing condition came out with measurably higher relationship satisfaction scores immediately afterward.¹

Two details matter. The activity was novel and physiologically activating. A new but boring task probably would not work. The couples also did the task together, not in parallel. They had to coordinate, fail a little, and reset. Researchers think the positive arousal gets attributed to the partner standing right there, a phenomenon psychologists have described since Dutton and Aron’s shaky-bridge studies of the 1970s. Your heart races. Your brain scans for a reason. Your partner is the closest reason.

Is there a brain story behind it?

There is, and it is more interesting than the usual “love is dopamine” line. Functional MRI work from Aron’s lab has shown that being shown a photo of a partner activates dopamine-rich reward regions, specifically the ventral tegmental area and the dorsal striatum, in early-stage intense romantic love.⁵ What surprised researchers was a 2012 follow-up: in long-married couples who still rated themselves as intensely in love, the same dopaminergic reward circuitry lit up when they saw their spouse’s face. The pattern looked structurally similar to early-stage romance, not to the calmer companionate-love pattern most people expect after twenty years.⁴

That is suggestive, not conclusive. Brain-imaging studies of love are small and hard to replicate. The broader point is plausible: novelty and shared activity may be one of the cheaper ways for a long-term couple to keep recruiting reward circuitry that already evolved to fire for partners.

What boredom in year five does to satisfaction in year fourteen

If you only read one follow-up to the 2000 paper, make it Irene Tsapelas, Arthur Aron, and Terri Orbuch’s 2009 paper in Psychological Science. They drew on a long-running study of married couples in the Detroit area and asked a deceptively simple question. If a couple reports being bored with the marriage at year seven, does that predict anything about how satisfied they will be at year sixteen?²

It does. Boredom at the seven-year mark statistically predicted lower marital satisfaction nine years later, even after the researchers controlled for satisfaction at year seven. In other words, two couples who reported the same satisfaction in year seven could end up in very different places by year sixteen, and the level of boredom they reported was part of what separated them. The effect was not enormous, but it was real and it ran in the direction the self-expansion model predicts.²

The take from that study is uncomfortable. A relationship can feel fine and still be losing altitude because nothing new is being added to the joint life.

Does it have to be skydiving?

No. The lab task that produced the 2000 effect was, as a reminder, crawling across a mat tied to your spouse with a pillow between your stomachs for seven minutes. Nobody was risking their life. The activity has to be new to the two of you, mildly arousing, and shared. That is a much wider menu than most people realize.

A new hiking trail in a county you have never visited counts. So does signing up for a beginner pottery class together, learning a recipe from a cuisine neither of you knows, picking up a couples-style dance class, taking a one-day kayak rental on a calm lake, going to an unfamiliar museum and giving each other tours of the rooms you find most interesting. The point is not the cost. It is that the brain registers something it cannot autopilot through, and the partner is right there while it happens.³

What probably will not work is the same restaurant on the same street on the same Friday for the eleventh year running, even if it is a lovely restaurant. Familiarity has its own deep value in long-term love. It is not the enemy. It just is not the thing that produces the self-expansion effect.

It is not just one study

People are right to be skeptical of any single psychology paper, especially one published before the field’s broad shift toward larger samples and pre-registration. The 2000 Aron paper has held up reasonably well, but the more important point is that it does not stand alone. A 2019 review in Frontiers in Psychology by Becca Branand, Debra Mashek, and Arthur Aron tracked decades of work on self-expansion across courtship, marriage, friendship, and even parent-child bonds. The pattern of findings, drawing on diary studies, lab experiments, longitudinal surveys, and brain imaging, is consistent with the model’s core prediction: shared novel and self-expanding activities are linked with higher relationship quality, and the absence of them tracks with decline.³

Reviews are not perfect either. Self-expansion researchers tend to publish on self-expansion, and some effect sizes in the older literature were probably inflated by small-sample methods. Larger pre-registered replications are starting to appear, and so far the basic novelty-and-shared-arousal effect has tended to survive in some form, even when the size shrinks.

Where the advice gets too easy

Self-expansion is not a relationship cure. The 2000 paper, the 2009 longitudinal follow-up, and the 2019 review all studied couples who were already in stable, non-distressed relationships. None of them tested whether crawling across a gym mat repairs a marriage in serious trouble, and the researchers do not claim that. If a relationship is being eroded by contempt, untreated mental illness, financial trauma, infidelity, or chronic loneliness, a salsa class will not fix it.³

There is also a wrinkle in how the effect interacts with stress. A couple under acute stress, with small kids and two demanding jobs, may not have the bandwidth to add a “novel and arousing” activity to a calendar that is already cracking. In those cases, novelty might mean five minutes of trying to learn a new card game after the kids are asleep, not booking a weekend trip. The size of the dose matters less than the fact that the dose exists at all.

One more honest note. Effect sizes here are modest. A seven-minute task will not produce a year of bliss. The data suggest that small, frequent, shared injections of novelty have a cumulative payoff. Couples who keep adding to the joint life tend, on average, to drift apart more slowly. That is a real effect, but not magic.

How to translate this into a normal Tuesday

Most relationship advice fails because it asks people to be different than they are. The self-expansion idea is friendlier. It does not ask you to feel passionate. It asks you to do something together that the two of you have not done before, often enough that the joint identity keeps expanding by a small fraction every month.

A few practical anchors. Pick activities that require both of you to be a beginner. Asymmetry, where one partner becomes the expert teaching the other, is a different dynamic. Aim for mild activation: walking briskly through somewhere new, dancing, paddling, a small bouldering wall. Build in a tiny amount of friction, the kind that produces a story at the end. Avoid scheduling these moments so tightly that they feel like a chore.

The original Power Mindset post that prompted this article got it right: “You don’t need an elaborate vacation or expensive date night. Even small doses of novelty and mild adventure” can support connection. The science is friendlier to that claim than most viral relationship posts deserve.

Common questions about novelty and relationship satisfaction

How often should couples try something new together?

The research does not pin down a magic frequency. Aron’s diary studies tracked weekly novel and exciting activities, and couples who reported more of them, week over week, scored higher on relationship quality. A reasonable rule of thumb is one shared new experience a week, or even every other week, big or small.¹

Does the activity have to be physical?

No. Most published studies use physically active tasks because they reliably produce mild arousal in a lab setting, but cognitive novelty, like learning a language or visiting an unfamiliar art exhibition, fits the self-expansion model too. The key features are novelty, shared engagement, and at least some emotional or physiological activation.³

What if my partner does not like trying new things?

That is real, and the research does not pretend otherwise. The novelty has to feel inviting, not coerced. Start small, pick activities close to interests your partner already has, and frame them as exploration rather than self-improvement homework. A reluctant partner who agrees to try one new restaurant has technically done the experiment.

Can novelty replace therapy if a relationship is struggling?

No. Self-expansion research has been done with couples who were not in serious distress, and the authors of the 2019 review are explicit that novelty is not a substitute for couples therapy when there are deeper issues such as contempt, infidelity, or untreated mental health conditions.³

Is this the same thing as having a “date night”?

It overlaps but is not identical. A date night that is the same dinner at the same place every week is shared time, which has its own value, but it is not novel and not arousing. The self-expansion effect is specifically about the new and the slightly activating.

What the evidence actually supports

Read the source posts that circulate on social media about this research and they tend to overshoot. They promise reignited sparks, marriage saved, passion restored. The original studies are quieter than that. They show that small, shared, novel, mildly exciting activities are associated with modestly higher relationship quality, that boredom in midlife marriage predicts measurable declines years later, and that couples who keep growing together appear to keep some of the reward-circuitry response that early love produced.^1,2,4

That is not a small claim, but it is specific. If a relationship has gone quiet without anything being wrong, this is one of the few interventions that has held up across enough evidence to take seriously. Try a thing together you have never tried. Notice what happens. The science does not promise more, and it does not need to.

Sources

1. Aron A, Norman CC, Aron EN, McKenna C, Heyman RE. Couples’ shared participation in novel and arousing activities and experienced relationship quality. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2000;78(2):273–284. PubMed: 10707334
2. Tsapelas I, Aron A, Orbuch T. Marital boredom now predicts less satisfaction 9 years later. Psychol Sci. 2009;20(5):543–545. PubMed: 19389134
3. Branand B, Mashek D, Aron A. Pair-Bonding as Inclusion of Other in the Self: A Literature Review. Front Psychol. 2019;10:2399. PubMed: 31708838
4. Acevedo BP, Aron A, Fisher HE, Brown LL. Neural correlates of long-term intense romantic love. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2012;7(2):145–159. PubMed: 21208991
5. Aron A, Fisher H, Mashek DJ, Strong G, Li H, Brown LL. Reward, motivation, and emotion systems associated with early-stage intense romantic love. J Neurophysiol. 2005;94(1):327–337. PubMed: 15928068