Relationships 2.0: Keeping Love Alive

The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode. Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Some months ago, I brought seven key insights from the first decade of Hidden Brain to live stage performances in San Francisco and Seattle. The evenings were electric. We got so much positive feedback from those two sold out shows that we've decided to launch a tour to more than a dozen cities in the coming months. I'll be coming to Portland, Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago, Austin, Dallas, Boston, Toronto, Clearwater, Fort Lauderdale, Phoenix, Baltimore, Washington, DC., and Los Angeles. Presale tickets are available right now for listeners like you. The pre-sale only runs five days. To snap up your tickets, please go to hiddenbrain.org/tour. The pre-sale password is brain, all caps. You can also sign up to say hello and get a photo with me. In some places, you can sign up for an intimate chat with me and a handful of other fans. I'd love to see you there. Again, go to hiddenbrain.org/tour. Okay, on to today's show. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Let's just say this out loud. Romantic relationships are hard. Finding the right relationship and then keeping it alive, this requires effort, skill, and luck. In the last few weeks of our Relationships 2.0 series, we've looked at the power of human connection, insights into negotiation, and the role of tiny interactions in our daily lives. Please check out those episodes if you've missed them. They are filled with valuable insights from some of the world's most distinguished researchers on these topics. Today, in the final chapter of our Relationships 2.0 series, we tackled a big question. Love. We look at a problem that seems to be as old as humankind. How do we keep love alive? We've all sat in restaurants next to couples who look like they have been together for decades. They don't talk to each other. They don't touch one another. They barely look at each other. Perhaps you wondered, were they always like this? Was there a time they were madly in love? This week on Hidden Brain, surprising insights into the magic ingredients that keep love alive. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Amazon. The last thing you want to do when you're sick is to go to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription. Because then, you're standing in a long line with a whole bunch of sick people. And everyone is sick of being sick around other people who are sick. Amazon Pharmacy will deliver right to you, fast, so you can get meds without congregating amongst the contagious. Healthcare just got less painful. Amazon Pharmacy. When we talk about falling in love, we usually refer to it as a very special and unusual period, one characterized by thrilling feelings of exhilaration and euphoria. It's widely assumed that these intense feelings of passion and romance cannot last forever, that they will eventually give way to the mundane realities of daily life. But does that have to be so? At Stony Brook University, psychologist Arthur Aron has pondered this question for decades. Arthur Aron, welcome to Hidden Brain.



Art Aron: Thank you.



Shankar Vedantam: Art, in 2009, you and your research assistant set out to look for what you might call a unicorn, for a very unusual kind of individual. What kind of people were you looking for, and how did you go about finding them?



Art Aron: Well, we were looking for people, we were looking for couples that were very intensely in love. These were people who had been married on the average for 20 years. And we basically just asked various people we knew, that my collaborators knew, and my then-graduate student, Bianca Acevedo, who's now a professor, she interviewed them just to see that they really meant it. And sure enough, we were able to find, you know, plenty.



Shankar Vedantam: I'm curious what these couples told you when they came into your lab. Again, these are people who had been together for a long time, sometimes decades. I understand one couple in their 60s really stood out to you and Bianca?



Art Aron: Well, we just basically asked them, they would sit together and we'd ask them to describe, you know, what's going on in their relationship. You know, these were all people who said they were very intensely in love. And we asked them, what does that mean and how does that work? And Bianca, my favorite story is Bianca told me, one couple said, we always annoy our friends because we're always all over each other physically. So while they're talking, they're touching each other and doing things like that.



Shankar Vedantam: So now it's possible that, of course, that when people say that they are deeply in love and passionately in love, they're just telling you that because they want to make you think that they are in a very happy relationship. So you must have been a little skeptical of what they were saying, given that this runs so counter to the stereotype we have about how relationships decline over time.



Art Aron: Well, we were. In fact, that's why we did the study. So we put them in the scanner to look at what their brains look like, what areas become active when they look at pictures of their partner. We've done many earlier studies of people who have just fallen in love. And the key finding was known as the dopamine reward area that would pick up when they look at a picture of their partner versus a neutral friend. And we found that these people showed the same thing. They showed that activation in the dopamine reward area.



Shankar Vedantam: So if I'm visualizing this correctly, you're putting people in a brain scanner and you're showing them pictures of either their beloved or somebody who is just a neutral person or an acquaintance.



Art Aron: Well, it's an acquaintance that is of the same gender as their partner, as attractive as attractive as their partner. We test for all of that and they look at the two pictures. I mean, they alternate the two and we're looking at what goes on in their brain when they're looking at that one. This is exactly what we did in the initial study of people who had just fallen in love. We find that strong dopamine reward area. One other thing that we didn't find in the long term, we find an indication of anxiety, tension. You know, if you've just fallen in love with someone, you're likely to worry, are they going to leave me? Are some going to happen to them? Whereas if you've been with someone for 20 years, you don't worry about that as much.



Shankar Vedantam: So, when you scan the brains of people who had been together for a long time, but who reported that they were very intensely in love, besides experiencing this dopamine surge when they saw their partners, you also indicate that they also seem to be a little bit more contented compared to people who had just fallen in love a short time ago.



Art Aron: Well, there's another area of the brain that has been found mostly in animals, where they've got, you know, a lifelong bond, an attachment bond, and we saw that also in the long term couples. I mean, it's kind of natural if you've been together a while, and you and you things are going well, they have that kind of common security.



Shankar Vedantam: I'm struck that these couples went against the stereotype that we have, that passionate love fades over time. You know, the honeymoon period is followed by a decline in romantic intensity. Talk about that stereotype art, how widespread it is that we believe that relationships start out very intensely, and then they decline over time.



Art Aron: Well, overall, there's lots of research showing that relationships tend to decline over time. You know, after 10 years, half of them, at least in the US., are divorced, are close to half. You know, and overall, not for everybody, but they tend to decline. And so, that seems to be what we think is the standard.



Shankar Vedantam: So, you ran a survey and found that, in fact, these couples are not necessarily unicorns. They might not be a majority of the people who are in relationships, but there is a sizable number of them, right?



Art Aron: Yeah. When we did a US nationally representative survey, we found that of people married 10 years or longer, 40% claimed to be very intensely in love. Now, that means only 20% of those that got married that are still together, but still, that's more than we expected.



Shankar Vedantam: When you shared these findings with others, you found that some significant number of people might feel threatened by the findings, or even resistant to the idea that couples could be very happy over a long period of time. Talk about this finding and why that might be the case, Ar.



Art Aron: Well, there is findings, not from my lab, but from others, showing that one of the ways couples often feel good about themselves is by comparing to other couples. You know, you leave a party and say, oh, those people always argue, you know, we don't do that as much. But, so it's kind of hard to then be told that, no, some people have really passionate relationships. If you don't, as most people don't, it could be a little annoying. On the other hand, it's a reminder that maybe you could do something. We shouldn't just assume that there's nothing we can do. We should look for some way to make it more like that, and not just go along with how things are.



Shankar Vedantam: Many of us assume that long-term relationships necessarily wither over time. But what if that's not true? And if it's not true, what's the secret of couples whose passion has lasted for decades? When we come back, the science of keeping a long-term relationship vital. You're listening to Hidden Brain.



Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Arthur Aron is a psychologist at Stony Brook University. He studies how intimate relationships develop over time. Most of us assume that the passion that characterizes a budding relationship will fade with time, that's just the way it is. But Art has found it doesn't have to be that way. In a series of studies, he's found many couples who report being passionately in love, even after being together for decades. Once Art had this epiphany, he set out to explain it. Art, one clue to the puzzle came from a study you had conducted in Vancouver very early in your career. It became an iconic study in the field of psychology and was widely known as the Bridge Study. Can you describe the setup for me?



Art Aron: Yeah, what we did is, we went to a part of Vancouver that has a very large bridge way over a river that wobbles. And so, when you walk over it, it's a little scary. You could easily fall off. And so, we had an attractive woman, young woman standing on the bridge, and when men of appropriate age, by himself, would walk across, she would stop and say, could I ask you a few questions? I'm a researcher. And she asked some questions and showed him a little thing where he would write, make a little picture of something. And we said, thank you very much, and if you want to know more about it, you can phone me. And she'd give him the phone number. We also had her stop an equal number of men on a very safe nearby bridge.



Shankar Vedantam: Okay, so in one case, she's basically stopping men on this shaky bridge that is scary, and she's asking them these questions. And in the other condition, she's standing on a very stable bridge and asking another group of men the very same questions. So what happens?



Art Aron: What we found is that on the shaky bridge, the things that the pictures they wrote or the comments they made were much more, had much more romantic and sexual content, and they were much more likely to phone her. So that was the finding. And we've done follow up studies too. And the logic is that if you're shaken up, and you're not entirely sure of why, and you meet someone who's attractive, you're likely to think, oh, that's why I'm feeling this. And it turns out that in some other studies done later, it's been replicated many times in various ways, they found that if you're sort of worked up, and you meet someone who's unattractive, you're likely to feel strongly disgusted. In other words, you re-take the arousal you've gotten, you reinterpret it.



Shankar Vedantam: You know, I'm wondering whether this might explain some of the enduring popularity of horror movies where young couples might go and sit in a movie theater and watch something really scary.



Art Aron: Yeah. You have to be a little careful. I can tell you a little story. I, some years after we did this study, I ran into a student who attended one of my classes. And he said, Oh, Dr. Aron, I just wanted to tell you what happened recently. I was in India and I met at its hotel, this attractive young woman. And I thought, Oh, I know his research. 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 where they were going to have lunch, and they got off. And she said, Oh, that taxi driver is so attractive.



Shankar Vedantam: So the research experiment worked, but you have to be careful how it's designed, I suppose.



Art Aron: Yes, right.



Shankar Vedantam: So, of course, when couples meet and fall in love for the first time, they experience a lot of what happens on a shaky bridge. You know, you feel unsure, you're uncertain, maybe even a little afraid, you feel jitters and butterflies in your stomach. What you found in the bridge study is that you can almost reverse engineer the process. If you give people the jitters, and they're around someone who could potentially be a romantic partner, they're more likely to see the other person as a romantic partner.



Art Aron: 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.



Shankar Vedantam: I'm reminded of this story that the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett once told me. She's at Northeastern University, and she told me that many years ago when she was in graduate school, there was someone who wanted to go out on a date with her, and she wasn't very interested, and she finally agreed to go out and have coffee with this guy. And then she's sitting across from him, and suddenly her face is feeling flushed, and she's feeling like a rush of temperature in her forehead, and she's like, oh my god, maybe I actually was attracted to this guy, and I shouldn't have dismissed him out of the hand. Maybe I should pursue this. And at the end of the date, he says, can we go out for dinner next? And she says, yeah, let's do it. And she comes home, and then six seconds later, she has to throw up because she's coming down with the flu. And what she was experiencing was the early symptoms of flu and not sort of romantic attraction. But it's the same idea, isn't it, which is that we have these signals that come to us in our minds, and in some ways, our brains have to interpret what the signal is about. And they have to draw a conclusion. This signal is about my feelings for this other person. Right.



Art Aron: 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.



Shankar Vedantam: The shaky bridge study and Lisa Feldman Barrett's story of the confusing date both point to the same underlying insight. We are often not very good at identifying the source of our feelings. Young men on the shaky bridge experienced jitters because the bridge was unstable. When they happened to meet a young woman, the men confused their jitters about the bridge as romantic attraction for the woman. More of them followed up and gave the young woman a call. As Art began studying couples in long-term relationships, he had an insight. As couples fall into routines, getting kids ready for school in the mornings, dinner at the kitchen table in the evenings, social activities on the weekends with the same set of friends and neighbors, these activities start to become familiar. Over time, even if these activities are pleasant, they become predictable. Then, they can become boring. If people on a shaky bridge confuse their jitters for romantic attraction, what happens if you're in a long-term relationship with someone and constantly find yourself around the same person when you're feeling bored?



Art Aron: Well, I think boredom has a big effect. If everything is 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.



Shankar Vedantam: Talk about the work that you have done on a longitudinal basis, where you interviewed couples over a period of time and asked them about their levels of boredom and then evaluated how satisfied they were with their relationships down the road.



Art Aron: Well, they weren't interviewed in person. They did a questionnaire early on, and 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.



Shankar Vedantam: So, talk about why this might be the case, Art. I mean, when most people think about the factors that can undermine relationships, they don't think about boredom as being a prime culprit. They might think about infidelity or abusive behavior. But just the ordinary mundane factor of boredom plays a bigger role than many people consider?



Art Aron: 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.



Shankar Vedantam: So, as you've thought about these ideas for many years, you've developed a more sophisticated theory about what might be going on here. You say that people have a fundamental desire to expand the self, and that this often occurs through relationships. What do you mean by this art?



Art Aron: Well, we've shown that there's a whole bunch of evolutionary work, is that one main evolutionary thing is survival. The other is growth, change, expansion, what we call expansion. Is 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.



Shankar Vedantam: And when you say that our partners help to expand us, is it just because they bring new interests, new passions, new avocations of their own into our lives?



Art Aron: Well, yes, but they're also become part of us. So, their abilities and their resources, we actually mix up with our own, you know, we've done a lot of research showing that we mix up memories, we mix up, you know, who has what qualities, all sorts of stuff. I sometimes think I know things my partner knows that I don't, or that, you know, that sort of thing. So, you feel you know more than you did, you feel you have more resources than you did, you know, all sorts of things.



Shankar Vedantam: And can you speak a moment about what that drive is about, the drive of basically growth and expansion, you sort of describe it as a fundamental drive. Talk a little bit more about that. Where does that come from, and how does that manifest in our lives?



Art Aron: 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 wanting to know more, explore all of that, seeking growth and expansion and creativity. All of that is a long-term understanding and evolutionary psyche, and it's well documented.



Shankar Vedantam: I'm wondering whether this means that we are drawn to potential partners who promise us the possibility of expanding ourselves?



Art Aron: 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, and in some ways, much more easily.



Shankar Vedantam: I'm wondering whether there is any truth to the idea, then, that opposites might attract, because of course, if you are drawn to somebody who's very different from you, potentially your ability to expand yourself must be greater.



Art Aron: 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 a 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.



Shankar Vedantam: I'm wondering if one of the implications of this model is that when we first fall in love, you know, the sense of self-expansion is in overdrive. And is it possible that some of the euphoria we feel when we fall in love is not just because we are drawn to this other person, but in some ways, we are drawn to the kind of person that we are growing into, that in some ways, we are drawn to our own self-expansion, and that's part of the euphoria of falling in love.



Art Aron: 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.



Shankar Vedantam: So from that perspective, I'm wondering what this research has to say about the effects of long-term relationships. In other words, when we are in long-term relationships, there's obviously a certain amount of familiarity that creeps in, because of course, you know this other person. You've been with this other person for five years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. Is it possible that this other person just naturally then stops helping you expand? Because in some ways, you know that person very well, and they know you very well, and this might be a source of boredom?



Art Aron: Well, yes. I mean, the other person, you've already expanded by including them. I mean, if you were to break up with them, you would lose that. We've shown it's hard to break up a relationship if you have a lot of sense of expansion, including them in the self. So, no, the process of getting there is exciting. But once you're there, you get used to it. You wouldn't want to lose it, but you get used to it. Now, if you or your partner, if you do something exciting together, you associate that with the partner. If you have some expansion together, or if your partner has an expansion that you can feel connected to, even as an individual, that can be expanding to the self.



Shankar Vedantam: Arthur research on the effects of novelty and challenge and on the process of self-expansion suggests a tantalizing possibility. It's the key to keeping long-term relationships romantic and passionate in our own hands. When we come back, practical ways to keep boredom at bay and make a relationship continue to feel exciting and alive. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.



Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Arthur Aron is a psychologist at Stony Brook University. He studies how to keep love alive. Art, in the late 1960s, you were enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of California, Berkeley. You were a teaching assistant and helping to instruct a class. Something important in your life happened at the end of that class. Can you paint a picture of what happened for me?



Art Aron: There was a student in the class who I had a lot of sort of conflict with. The last day of class, we walked out. We looked at each other. I can still remember this so vividly. We looked at each other a minute and we kissed. And from that moment on, we've been living together. We just celebrated our 50th anniversary. It was so intense. And in fact, it's really what prompted my studying love. I was a graduate student in social psychology. The idea then was to look for a topic that people think can't be studied scientifically and do it. And there was very little research on love at that time. So that became, you know, what I decided to study. But no, I fell intensely in love with this woman.



Shankar Vedantam: So, what was it like in the early days of the relationship, Art, when you and the student whose name was Elaine got together? What was it like in those first few days and months?



Art Aron: It was wonderful. About two months later, we started living together. It was very intense and wonderful. We made a big decision a couple years later to have a baby. We didn't want to get married because, you know, coming from Berkeley in those years, we didn't like the idea. But when our son was four years old, he came home and said, Mommy, what's a bastard? And we thought we'd better get married. So, we've been living together, actually, 57 years, but we've been married for 50.



Shankar Vedantam: Given that Art is a psychologist, it's perhaps not surprising that he examined the moment he and Elaine fell in love, and asked himself what happened between them psychologically.



Shankar Vedantam: In time, he and his colleagues explored whether love could be engineered between two strangers. They came up with a list of questions that people could ask one another that would get them to open up, to share, to make themselves vulnerable. Years later, this research went viral in a New York Times article titled The 36 Questions That Lead to Love. Art said that in this research, they paired up strangers and had them sit across from one another. The questions were divided into three sections. Over a 45-minute encounter, the couple would pose questions from each section to each other. The researchers gave volunteers specific instructions.



Art Aron: One is that each would answer the question, and then the other would answer, and they go on so they could hear each other and have a chance to be responsive. Another element was the questions were designed so that they moved from not being very intimate or close to being more and more intimate stuff. You know, if you get on a plane and you talk about, you sit down with someone, you start talking about the most intense things in your life, you can put them off. So if you start with, you know, smaller things and then gradually move to bigger and you go both ways. So it's just so the first set is fairly mundane, you know, if you go out to dinner with anyone in the world throughout history, who would you go out to dinner with? You know, and then they get more and more personal.



Shankar Vedantam: The researchers encouraged volunteers to identify things they had in common. Of course, people do this in real life all the time. We like others who share our passions for music or sports. What the researchers were doing was to force the volunteers to identify such commonalities.



Art Aron: One of the things that makes people want to get close is to feel they have things in common. Actually having them isn't as important as feeling they do. In the second set, I think we have an item that says, name some things you've noticed you have in common. We never say name some things you don't have in common.



Shankar Vedantam: So in set one, I'm looking at the list of questions right now. You have questions like, what would constitute a perfect day for you? Or when did you last sing to yourself? Or if you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or the body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want? And I guess these are interesting questions. These are the kind of questions you might ask a stranger at a bar, but they're not particularly intimate or deep.



Art Aron: Yeah. And even those get a little stronger as you move ahead, but yes, within the first 12.



Shankar Vedantam: And so the next 12 starts to ask even deeper questions. What is your most treasured memory? What is your most terrible memory? What roles do love and affection play in your life? How do you feel about your relationship with your mother? And these are the questions that you could imagine asking someone once you've gotten to know them. Now, typically, I think most people in real life might get to asking those questions after getting to know someone for a few weeks or a few months. You're sort of accelerating the process in some ways by having them ask these questions in the second 15-minute bout.



Art Aron: Yeah, that's right. That's the idea. We want to create closeness in 45 minutes.



Shankar Vedantam: And I'm wondering what happens as you do this. The last set of questions in some ways get to very intense questions. You know, when did you last cry in front of another person? If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? I mean, very, very intense and personal questions. What happens when you put volunteers through these sets of questions, Art?



Art Aron: Well, they get closer. This closest procedure in 45 minutes really works. It doesn't necessarily keep them close in the long term, but certainly right afterwards, they often report feeling as close to the person they were doing the activity with as to the closest person in their life. It really creates a sense of intense closeness.



Shankar Vedantam: Art says the experimental intervention underscored a number of important points. First, self-disclosure, revealing things about yourself to someone else, is key to deepening relationships. But it's not just because people feel closer to those to whom they reveal secrets. It's because when we share things that reveal who we really are, it allows other people to respond with compassion and understanding. Self-disclosure is a trigger for other people's responsiveness. Art and researchers like former Hidden Brain guest Harry Rees feel that its responsiveness that is the glue for relationships.



Art Aron: Self-disclosure provides an opportunity for deep responsiveness. You know, when you interact with someone, and you know, you say something, and you feel they've heard you, they understand you, they care about you, that matters a lot.



Shankar Vedantam: It might seem obvious, but another powerful idea embedded in the questions is they ask people to share what they like about each other. Very often, as we go through life, we notice things about other people that we like or admire. Few of us take the time to actually voice these thoughts aloud. How much of a difference does that make?



Art Aron: That's a huge effect. Feeling someone likes you, it really matters for getting close to them. In fact, it's a major factor that we found in falling in love. You know, we've done a lot of surveys where we ask people who have recently fallen in love what happened. And a major thing is that I discovered the other person liked me. So, for example, a person is saying, you know, I've met this woman, and, you know, I kind of liked her, and I ran into her at a store, and she looked at me and she smiled at me. And at that moment, I fell in love. I've heard so many stories like that. At that moment where I discovered, my friend said, oh, you know, this person likes you, don't you? Those sorts of things. They really can matter a lot, you know. Oh, I ran into this person again, and he sat down next to me, you know. You know, those kinds of things really matter.



Shankar Vedantam: In a longer intervention, Art and his colleagues went even further to engineer a feeling of closeness between two people.



Art Aron: The longer one is an hour and a half, and it has a lot of questions towards the end that, you know, are, you know, imagine you've fallen in love with this person. Tell them what you feel. You know, things like that. It also has the item people talk about a lot that are not in the 36 questions, but, you know, look in their eyes for three minutes in each other's eyes. Things like that, towards the end, that really are aimed at creating romantic feelings. We tried to be very careful doing that study not to include people who are already in relationships. Two of the students in my lab tried this out, you know, to experiment, and they literally fell in love, and they got married.



Shankar Vedantam: Wow, wow. So we've discussed how the 36 questions were intended to create a sense of closeness between strangers. They were not intended necessarily to improve or deepen an already existing relationship between people who had been together for 10 years or 20 years. But you found that there's a way to make the questions useful for couples who've been together for a long time, and this insight involves other couples. Walk me through this idea, Art.



Art Aron: Well, there had been again a lot of survey research showing that when you have close friends, the relationships are better. So we were able to randomly assign couples to do this as a couple with another. So they answered, all the four of them answered each question. And we found that after doing this as a foursome, it much increased their passionate love for each other. It doesn't make you love the other people. It makes you like them better, feel more close to them. It increases your passionate love for your partner.



Shankar Vedantam: And why do you think that's happening?



Art Aron: Well, we did some tests of why, and the main reason seems to be responsiveness. When you're with another couple and you're talking about deep things, you tend to be more responsive to your own partner. All four of you answer each question. You know, and it's that greater sense of responsiveness that you experience that really makes a difference.



Shankar Vedantam: In recent years, Art and his colleagues have started to look for other ways to help couples in long-term relationships keep love alive. Many of them go back to that insight from the BRID study. When people experience an emotion when they are in the company of another person, they tend to associate that person with the emotion they are feeling. If you spend a lot of time around someone and feel bored, you will come to think of that person as boring. But if you can spend a lot of time around the person doing interesting and novel things, you will come to associate that person with surprise and growth. Art says he and Elaine try to put this idea into practice.



Art Aron: You know, we try every week at least to do something new and different, and we do some big adventures. You know, usually every summer we take a trip to Europe and go to some place we've never been before and hike from village to village. And one summer we did something really exciting. We went down the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon on a floating boat with about seven or eight other people and with a friend of ours. And it was intense, but it was really wonderful. I mean, in general, the more exciting and interesting the things you do with your partner, you then associate with your partner. And when it's difficult and you overcome the difficulties, that's a big plus too, that's expanding.



Shankar Vedantam: Art told me that you don't need to go on expensive vacations in order to find novelty. He says daily activities, where you go for a walk or what you eat for dinner, can also provide such novelty.



Art Aron: Yes, we make a point of doing something new and interesting every week at least. We go to concerts and ballets, but we never go to the same ones, you know. And we really enjoy the newness, the change.



Shankar Vedantam: I understand that one time you were coming back from a play and you walked by a bar, and you noticed that you hadn't hung out in a bar for a long time. Tell me the story of what happened that night.



Art Aron: Well, we were in New York at the time, and we went to a lot of plays, and we were walking back from a play past a bar. And when we go to the bar, we've never done that before. We haven't done that in years and years. We used to when we were younger. So we went in and had a good time.



Shankar Vedantam: Another time, Art and Elaine met up at a bar and pretended to be strangers meeting each other for the first time.



Art Aron: We went down to this place, and we both sat there. One came in a little before the other. The other sat down near... I don't know who came in first, but the other one came in and sat near them, and had some small discussion. Oh, hi. How are you? I don't remember what name I used, and we talked about what we did, which was not what we actually do. But it was kind of fun, and we pretended like we were just meeting, and that was a fun activity. We talked for a while, and then basically went home as if it was a hotel and had some fun.



Shankar Vedantam: Uh-huh. So I think a lot of couples who have been together for a while say, you know, we regularly plan to do activities that we both enjoy. We might go out to a restaurant, we might go and watch a movie. These are pleasant activities. But you're saying pleasant is actually not enough.



Art Aron: That's right. I mean, it doesn't hurt. But if you can do more than that, you know, let's go to a restaurant. Let's go to one we've never been to before. You know, let's go to a kind of restaurant we've never been to before. You know, let's do something really different. You know, that's what matters.



Shankar Vedantam: And you've run experiments along these lines where you actually ask people to do activities that are either, you know, pleasant or exciting. So you're actually trying to distinguish between those two things, between the novel and the pleasant.



Art Aron: Yeah, well, we've done experiments in the lab, but one of the early things we did is we gave couples a long list of activities, and they had to rate each on a number of things, including how exciting it would be to do this. This is a standard list of activities people do. Then we took a subset of the things that they listed as exciting, but not particularly pleasant or not unpleasant, but, you know, and randomly assigned half of them to do something from that list, and half to do something from the other items. And every week to do spend half hour to an hour doing one of these things are a little longer. And we had them do this for 10 weeks. And we found that those who were in the exciting activity group showed much bigger increase in the quality of their relationships than the other one. Hmm.



Shankar Vedantam: Hmm. So, in other words, if I and my partner, for example, don't particularly think of rock climbing or bungee jumping as pleasant, but we would find it very exciting and novel, what you're suggesting is that doing these activities together in some ways can prompt us to feel closer to one another than if we engaged in merely pleasant activities.



Art Aron: Yeah, well, it's nice if the activity is both pleasant and novel, but as long as it's, again, as long as it's not more than you can handle.



Shankar Vedantam: Yeah. In one of your studies, Art, you had couples engage in an unusual activity where you tied their wrists and ankles together. Now, this can seem a little risqué, but I understand this was a family-friendly experiment?



Art Aron: Yes. They came into the lab, and we said, we're going to have you do some things And in one condition, we tied their wrists and ankles together with Velcro strips And we had them go across, I don't know, it was about 25 feet or something on gym mats And there was a big round rolled thing in the middle And they had to go back and forth over it And they had to beat a certain number of minutes to win And then we had a control condition where one of them would go back and forth, and the other would watch And they enjoyed that, you know, it was pleasant But we found that those doing the exciting one together, the more interesting one together, showed a big increase in their feeling of love.



Shankar Vedantam: Art says, the key is not getting your heart rate up during the activity. It's about doing something unusual.



Art Aron: Just doing something arousing with your partner that's not new and interesting, like going to the gym together or something, does not increase your love for your partner. Doing something new and interesting that is not necessarily arousing does. Now, it doesn't hurt if you have both. In a long-term relationship, what matters is doing things that are novel and interesting with your partner. It's not just doing them and having your partner nearby, it's doing them together. So you feel, yes, I'm having this feeling, but I'm sharing it with my partner. So this is part of who we are as a couple.



Shankar Vedantam: Some of your research points toward the importance of engaging in activities with your partner that involve humor. Why would this be important, Art?



Art Aron: Well, it's because it's sort of expanding again to feel humor with your partner. You know, you go to a comedy show or something like that. You know, it riles you up in a good way. It feels new and interesting, and you're sharing it. It makes you feel connected with him. It makes you feel you're one. We've done a lot of research on that, showing how you become one with the other. Not quite fully one, but close to one.



Shankar Vedantam: You also found that one way to create a certain amount of unpredictability in relationships is to engage in activities with your partner that involve friendships with other couples. Why does this matter?



Art Aron: Oh, close friendships with other couples really matters a lot. There's a lot of correlational research, a lot of survey research showing this, and we did some experiments using our 36 questions where we had both couples do this together, and we showed that one of the causalities is, if you're close to another couple, you spend time with them and you talk about deep things, you feel deeply connected, that creates a sense of, you appreciate your partner's responsiveness, to you even, in that context, your partner tends to be more responsive, which is a really important element in relationships. Feeling your partner is responsive. Being responsive to your partner is good, but feeling your partner is responsive to you. They hear you, they understand you, they care about you. Those are crucial. Last summer, we went on a bar strip with one of our closest couple friends. So we had both an exciting activity and a novel, challenging activity. Never been on a bar strip down a river in Scotland, you know. And we also had it with a close friend, so it had a double effect.



Shankar Vedantam: Art says he decided to follow his research findings, and not his gut, when Elaine asked to go on a whale watching trip. Art gets seasick, but he recognized that the trip was important to his wife and would be a novel activity.



Art Aron: Well, to prepare for the trip, I got some pills that are supposed to help you. I got a patch I could put on. I got a thing I put on my wrist. I did all these things that people talk about help you deal with, because I knew I get seasick easily. And of course, we've since then done a little whale watching on a very large, flat boat, not in a difficult ocean. It went okay. But this time, we were going out into the San Francisco, not the bay, beyond the bay, and it's very rough water, and it was just too much. I fed the whales the whole time, leaning over the edge.



Shankar Vedantam: So another way to introduce freshness in a relationship is to find ways to celebrate a partner's successes. Many of us think that relationships are about supporting a partner in bad times. You say it might be even more important to focus on good times?



Art Aron: Yeah, there's research showing that celebrating your partner's successes matters even more than supporting when things go badly, although that also matters. My wife studies something called the highly sensitive person, and I collaborate with her on that, just like she collaborates with me on our relationship research. Well, the very first time I read the paper talking about the role of it being important to celebrate your partner's successes, she had recently submitted a paper to a very top scientific journal. I was a co-author, but it was basically her paper, and we thought it had a poor chance of getting accepted, but we gave it a chance. Before she came home, I got an email from the editor saying the reviewers loved it, I loved it, this is a great paper, we're going to publish it. And so I made a poster of that, and put it on the front door for when she came home.



Shankar Vedantam: And so the first thing she saw when she came home was this big poster saying that her paper had been accepted in the journal?



Art Aron: Yes.



Shankar Vedantam: And I think even beyond the fact that she must have been very happy about the paper being accepted, what she's also hearing in that moment is that you are so happy for her that you've gone to some lengths to celebrate it.



Art Aron: Yes. Yeah, that's true. We had a great night, as you can imagine.



Shankar Vedantam: Arthur Aron is a psychologist at Stony Brook University. Art, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.



Art Aron: My pleasure. Thank you so much, Shankar.



Shankar Vedantam: Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quarell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Today's conversation was the final episode in our Relationships 2.0 series. If you missed any of the other episodes in the series, you can find them on the Hidden Brain podcast or at hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.