Why Trying New Things Together Keeps a Relationship Fresh

Doing small new things together is one of the best-evidenced ways to keep a relationship feeling alive. The self-expansion research, and a tiny weekly move.

July 19, 20264 min read

Even a good relationship settles into a shape. The same Friday, the same three restaurants, the same loop of a conversation you have had a hundred times. Nothing is wrong, and yet the sense of discovering each other has gone quiet. That quieting is not a warning sign, it is a predictable feature of closeness, and there is a well-studied, surprisingly small way to bring some of the spark back. Here is what the research on shared novelty actually shows, and one tiny weekly move that fits it.

What Self-Expansion Actually Is

The framework here is self-expansion theory, developed by Arthur Aron and colleagues over several decades. The core idea is that part of what draws us to a relationship is growth: a partner brings new experiences, perspectives, and possibilities, and being close to them expands who we are. Early on, that expansion is fast. Almost everything is a first, so the relationship is saturated with novelty and the sense of becoming more than you were.

Over time, you fold the partner into your own sense of self, which is a good thing and also the source of the problem. Once that inclusion is complete, the rate of new slows down. In a 2026 review, Aron and Jennifer Tomlinson describe how this settling is exactly when a relationship can start to feel dull, not because the love faded but because the supply of shared novelty did. The useful part of their argument is what comes next: you can deliberately restart that expansion, and the relationship gets the credit for it.

Does Doing New Things Together Really Help?

The evidence is unusually clean for a relationship question. The landmark study is Aron, Norman, Aron, McKenna, and Heyman's 2000 experiment, which randomly assigned couples to spend time on either a novel and stimulating shared task or a pleasant but ordinary one. The couples who did the novel activity together reported higher relationship quality immediately afterward. Because it was randomized, the novelty was doing the causal work, not some pre-existing difference between the couples.

More recent work has held up the same pattern in real life. Kiersten Dobson and colleagues ran two preregistered dyadic daily-experience studies in 2024, following both partners through their ordinary days. On the days couples actually did novel, interesting things together, both people reported higher relationship satisfaction and commitment that day.

There is an honest wrinkle worth keeping, because it makes the finding more useful rather than less. Dobson's team also looked two months out, and the daily boost and the longer-term change came from different places:

The activities themselves reliably lifted satisfaction and commitment on the same day.
What predicted higher satisfaction and commitment two months later was self-expansion potential, the felt sense that the relationship still has room to grow, not the behaviors alone.

So a shared new experience does two jobs at once. It lifts the day you do it, and it quietly refreshes the belief that there is more of each other still to discover, and that belief is the part that carries forward.

Why Small Beats Grand

The instinct when a relationship feels flat is to plan something big: the expensive trip, the elaborate anniversary. The research points the other way. What matters is not the scale but three ingredients, that the thing is new, that you do it together, and that it is a little bit interesting or challenging. A weekend in Rome qualifies, but so does almost anything you have not done before:

A street or neighborhood neither of you has walked
A dish neither of you has cooked, made together
A five-minute detour on the way home to somewhere unplanned
A small skill you pick up side by side, badly, for the first time

Be honest about the size of the effect. It is modest, and the research is specifically about romantic couples, so this is a lever for a relationship rather than a cure-all for a mood. But it is cheap, repeatable, and it works precisely because it is small enough to actually do this week.

Making It a Regular Thing

The reason this fades in most relationships is not disagreement about its value. It is that no one remembers to start it. The fix is to stop relying on inspiration and give the intention a recurring cue, a standing little prompt that asks, before the week fills up, what is one small new thing we could try.

Try One New Thing Together with Positive

The Positive app is built around small, repeatable moments that keep something good in view. A Daily Reminder brings a quote to you at the same time each day, a recurring cue you can let stand in for the question this research keeps pointing back to: what is one small new thing we could try this week? Read it, send it to your partner, and let it turn into a five-minute plan. No accounts, no ads if you go Premium, and it is free to download.

The spark is less something you find again than something you make, one small new thing at a time.