Relationships 2.0: Keeping Love Alive

Summary

Hidden Brain: Relationships 2.0 – Keeping Love Alive

Hosted by Shankar Vedantam

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Introduction

In the final episode of Hidden Brain's "Relationships 2.0" series, host Shankar Vedantam explores the enduring question: How do we keep love alive in long-term relationships? Joined by psychologist Arthur Aron from Stony Brook University, the conversation delves into the science behind maintaining passionate and fulfilling romantic relationships over decades.

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The Science of Lasting Love

Arthur Aron introduces his extensive research on couples who have sustained intense love over long periods, challenging the prevalent belief that romantic passion inevitably fades. Aron reveals that approximately 40% of couples married for ten years or more report being very intensely in love (07:57). This finding dispels the stereotype that only the initial stages of a relationship are characterized by deep passion.

Notable Quote:

“We found that of people married 10 years or longer, 40% claim to be very intensely in love.”
— Arthur Aron (09:33)

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The Bridge Study: Uncovering the Brain's Role in Love

Aron discusses his renowned "bridge study," conducted in 2009, aimed at understanding the neural mechanisms sustaining long-term love. The study involved couples married for an average of 20 years, who described themselves as intensely in love. Brain scans revealed activation in the dopamine reward area, similar to what is observed in newly enamored couples (06:57). Additionally, long-term couples showed activity in brain regions associated with security and attachment bonds, suggesting a stable emotional foundation beyond initial passion (08:16).

Notable Quote:

“We see activation of the dopamine reward area, which is the same as what we see in new love.”
— Arthur Aron (06:57)

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Boredom: The Silent Relationship Saboteur

Contrary to common concerns like infidelity or abusive behavior, Aron highlights boredom as a significant threat to long-term relationships. Longitudinal studies indicate that couples experiencing high levels of boredom are more likely to report reduced relationship satisfaction years later (20:26). Aron attributes this to the lack of novelty and self-expansion within the relationship, which can lead to feelings of stagnation.

Notable Quote:

“In our culture, you hope for more in a relationship. So if you're feeling bored, you're not getting everything you'd like from it.”
— Arthur Aron (21:17)

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The 36 Questions: Engineering Closeness

Aron elaborates on his groundbreaking research involving the "36 Questions that Lead to Love," designed to foster deep emotional connections between strangers. The questions progressively become more intimate, encouraging vulnerability and self-disclosure. When applied to existing couples, engaging in these questions significantly increased their passionate love due to enhanced responsiveness and emotional intimacy (40:04).

Notable Quote:

“Self disclosure provides an opportunity for deep responsiveness...they listen, understand, and care.”
— Arthur Aron (36:28)

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Practical Strategies for Maintaining Passion

Drawing from his research, Aron offers actionable strategies for couples to keep love alive:

1. Introduce Novelty and Excitement: Engaging in new and interesting activities helps associate positive emotions with one’s partner, countering boredom. Aron emphasizes that doing something new together—whether it's rock climbing or attending a unique event—can rekindle passion (41:12).

2. Celebrate Successes: Recognizing and celebrating a partner’s achievements fosters a supportive and appreciative environment. Aron shares a personal anecdote where he celebrated his wife Elaine’s academic success with a heartfelt gesture, reinforcing their emotional bond (50:54).

3. Engage with Other Couples: Building friendships with other couples introduces unpredictability and variety, adding freshness to the relationship dynamic.

4. Prioritize Self-Expansion: Aron underscores the importance of relationships as a means for personal growth and self-expansion. By integrating a partner’s resources, knowledge, and experiences, individuals can continuously evolve within the relationship (23:41).

Notable Quote:

“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.”
— Arthur Aron (42:11)

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Personal Insights: Aron and Elaine’s Journey

Arthur Aron shares the poignant story of how he and his wife Elaine met and sustained their relationship. Their commitment to weekly novel activities, such as adventurous trips and spontaneous visits to unfamiliar places, exemplifies the practical application of his research principles. Aron recounts moments where stepping out of their comfort zones, like attempting whale watching, deepened their bond despite challenges (42:36).

Notable Quote:

“The more exciting and interesting things you do with your partner, you then associate with your partner.”
— Arthur Aron (41:59)

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Conclusions and Takeaways

Keeping love alive in long-term relationships is achievable through intentional efforts to introduce novelty, foster emotional intimacy, celebrate each other’s successes, and prioritize personal and mutual growth. Arthur Aron’s research underscores that while relationships naturally evolve, maintaining passion and connection is within couples' control.

Final Thoughts:

“To keep love alive, it's vital for couples to seek growth and novelty together, respond empathetically to each other’s disclosures, and celebrate each other's successes.”
— Summary Based on Arthur Aron’s Insights

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

1. On Relationship Decline Stereotypes:

   “We found that of people married 10 years or longer, 40% claim to be very intensely in love.”
   — Arthur Aron (09:33)

2. On Self-Disclosure and Responsiveness:

   “Self disclosure provides an opportunity for deep responsiveness...they listen, understand, and care.”
   — Arthur Aron (36:28)

3. On Growth and Self-Expansion:

   “We’ve shown that 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.”
   — Arthur Aron (23:41)

4. On Introducing Novelty:

   “We make a point of doing something new and interesting every week at least.”
   — Arthur Aron (42:11)

5. On Associating Positive Emotions with Partner:

   “The more exciting and interesting things you do with your partner, you then associate with your partner.”
   — Arthur Aron (41:59)

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Conclusion

Arthur Aron’s insights provide a scientific foundation for nurturing long-term romantic relationships. By embracing novelty, fostering deep emotional connections, and celebrating each other’s achievements, couples can sustain and even enhance their passionate love over time.

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For those interested in exploring these concepts further, the "Relationships 2.0" series on Hidden Brain offers a wealth of knowledge from leading researchers in the field.

Transcript

[Shankar Vedantam]

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. 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 D.C. and Los Angeles. Presale tickets are available right now. For listeners like you, the Presale only runs five days. To snap up your tickets, please go to hiddenbrain.org tour. The presale 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 tackle the 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 Abbott. Let's talk about a small thing that can make a big difference if you have diabetes. The Freestyle Libre 3 sensor. The sensor gives you real time glucose readings so you can see the impact of every meal and activity to make better choices. This is progress. You can try the sensor at FreestyleLibre US. Terms and conditions apply for prescription only. Safety info found @freestylelibre us.

[Unknown Sponsor]

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[Shankar Vedantam]

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. Thank you, 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?

[Arthur Aron]

Well, we were looking for people. We were looking for couples that were very intensely in love. These were people who'd 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.

[Arthur 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. 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're 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.

[Arthur 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, you know, what areas become active when they look at pictures of their partner. We'd done many earlier studies of people who'd just fallen in love, and the key finding was known as the dopamine reward area. That would pick up when they looked at a picture of their partner versus a neutral friend. And we found that these people showed the same thing. They showed that activation of 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.

[Arthur Aron]

Well, it's an acquaintance that is of the same gender as their partner, is fairly 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 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? Or is something 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'd 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.

[Arthur Aron]

Well, there's another area of the brain that has been found mostly in animals where they've got a lifelong bond, 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 things are going well, to 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.

[Arthur 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 or 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?

[Arthur Aron]

Yeah. When we did a US nationally representative survey, we found that of people married 10 years or longer, 40% claim 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, Art.

[Arthur 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. I'm Shankar Vedanta. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Abbott. Let's talk about a small thing that can make a big difference if you have diabetes. The Freestyle Libre 3 sensor. The sensor gives you real time glucose readings so you can see the impact of every meal and activity to make better choices. This is progress. You can try the sensor at FreestyleLibre US. Terms and conditions apply for prescription only. Safety info found @freestylelibre us.

[Unknown Sponsor]

What is your calling? Maybe it's something you love to do. A goal you want to achieve, a skill you want to learn, or a difference you want to make you know it's part of who you are and part of the life you want. But do you know how you'll get there? The military can help you pursue your calling with countless opportunities to help you build a future filled with purpose. You have a calling. We have an answer. Learn [e-mail].

[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'd 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?

[Arthur 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. It 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 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?

[Arthur 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, 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 retake the arousal you've gotten. You reinterpret it.

[Shankar Vedantam]

Hmm. 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 what's something really scary?

[Arthur Aron]

Yeah, you have to be a little careful. I can tell you a little story. Some years after we did this study, I ran into a student who attended one of my classes, and he said, oh, Dr. Aaron, I just wanted to tell you what happened recently. I was in India and I met at this 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 they're going to have lunch, and they got off. And she said, oh, that taxi driver is so attractive.

[Shankar Vedantam]

So the research experiment works, but you have to be careful how it's designed, I suppose.

[Arthur 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.

[Arthur 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?

[Arthur 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 Brit 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 experience jitters because the bridge was unstable when they happen 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?

[Arthur Aron]

Well, I think boredom has a big effect. If everything's 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 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.

[Arthur Aron]

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

[Arthur 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?

[Arthur Aron]

Well, we've shown that there's a whole bunch of evolutionary work is that one of the 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?

[Arthur Aron]

Well, yes, but they 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's, 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?

[Arthur 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 psych 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.

[Arthur 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. 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, you know, 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 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.

[Arthur 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, the sense of self expansion is an 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?

[Arthur Aron]

Yes, 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 5 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?

[Arthur 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, 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]

Art's research on the effects of novelty and challenge and on the process of self expansion suggests a tantalizing possibility is 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 Vedanta.

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[Arthur Aron]

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[Arthur Aron]

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[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?

[Arthur Aron]

For me, 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'd been living together. We just celebrated our 50th anniversary. It. It was so intense. And in fact, it's really what prompted my studying love. I was a graduate student in social psychology, and 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?

[Arthur Aron]

It was wonderful. About two months later, we started living together. It was. It was very intense and wonderful, and 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. 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. Over a 45 minute encounter, the couple would pose questions from each section to each other. The researchers gave volunteers specific instructions.

[Arthur Aron]

One is that each would answer the question and then the other would answer and they'd 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 move 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? 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.

[Arthur 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 say, name some things you've noticed you have in common. We never say names and 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.

[Arthur 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.

[Arthur Aron]

Yeah, that's right. That's the idea. We wanna 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?

[Arthur Aron]

Well, they get closer. This closeness 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 Reiss feel that it's responsiveness that is the glue for relationships.

[Arthur 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?

[Arthur 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'd recently fallen in love what happened. And a major thing is I discovered the other person liked me. So, for example, a person is saying, you know, I 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.

[Arthur Aron]

The longer one is an hour and a half. And it has a lot of questions towards the end that, 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'd been together for, you know, 10 years or 20 years. But you found 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.

[Arthur Aron]

Well, there'd been, again, a lot of survey research showing that when you have close friends, 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?

[Arthur 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 bridge 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'll 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'll come to associate that person with surprise and growth. Art says he and Elaine try to put this idea into practice.

[Arthur 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. We take a trip to Europe and go to someplace we've never been before and hike from village to village. And one summer we did something really exciting. We went down the. Down the Colorado river in the Grand Canyon on a. You know, on a. On a. You know, on a floating boat with about seven or eight other people and with a friend of ours. And it was. 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.

[Arthur 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.

[Arthur 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 into the bar, we've never done that before and 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.

[Arthur 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 you know, had some small discussion. Oh, hi, how are you? I'm, I'm, you know, I don't remember what name I used. And, and we talked about what we did and you know, 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've 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.

[Arthur 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.

[Arthur 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 have to do something from the other items. And every week to do spend half hour to an hour doing one of these things or a little longer. And we had them do this for 10 weeks. And we found that those who were in the exciting activity group were showed much bigger increase in the quality of their relationships than the other one.

[Shankar Vedantam]

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.

[Arthur 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 risque, but I understand this was a family friendly experiment.

[Arthur Aron]

Yes. Yeah. 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 25ft 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.

[Arthur 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. 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, Dot?

[Arthur 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?

[Arthur 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, you know, 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 barge trip with one of our closest couple friends. So we had both an exciting activity and a novel, challenging activity. Never been on a barge trip down a river in Scotland, you know, and we also had it with a close friend. So it had 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.

[Arthur Aron]

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. And 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.

[Arthur 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. 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 gonna 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.

[Arthur 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.

[Arthur 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.

[Arthur 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, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerell, 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 [e-mail] I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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