New Adventures (🇦🇺)

Our honeymoon was full of new and exciting adventures: parasailing, trapezing, cuddling a koala, cliff jumping, rock sliding, and diving the Great Barrier Reef. It was also exciting simply to walk around a new city with my new wife in this new phase of life. It’s an excitement that still influences our relationship today.

Unsurprisingly, new and exciting experiences have been shown to have positive effects on relationships. In a classic study, researchers assigned married couples to engage in 90 minutes of activity that were self-defined as “exciting” or “pleasant” each week over the course of 10 weeks. Compared to both the “pleasant” group and a “no special activity” control, couples who engaged in “exciting” activities for 90 minutes a week rated their marriages as significantly more satisfying. Interestingly, couples in the “pleasant” group were no more satisfied than the control couples—it was only “exciting” activities that actively improved the marriage. As the researchers explain, it’s easy for us to habituate to our relationships—in other words, to become bored with them—but new and exciting activities can break the cycle, leading to lasting satisfaction.

While 90 minutes a week may seem like a lot of time, a follow-up study showed that couples can benefit much faster—in under 7 minutes, in fact. In this study, researchers asked couples to engage in an exciting activity of their own invention: to carry a large pillow across a gymnasium (including over a hurdle), while bound together by velcro, without using their hands. After engaging in this ridiculous (but new and exciting) activity, couples not only reported improved relationship quality compared to couples who engaged in a more mundane task, they were also observed to have more positive interactions by a third party who was blind to the conditions of the experiment.

Therefore, while our physical honeymoon is over, the approach we took to it certainly isn’t. As much as we can, we try to find new and exciting things to do every week, to keep that same sense of excitement alive, and keep our relationship always thriving.

— N