There's no magic potion that can make someone adore you. But there are things you can do to promote a deep and enduring connection — and even feelings of passion — between yourself and your partner. In the final chapter of our Relationships 2.0 series, psychologist Arthur Aron shares some techniques for falling and staying in love. In today's conversation, we explore:*The assumption that love fades over time.*The effects of daily routine on romantic relationships.*What our choice in a romantic partners says about us*How successful long-term couples keep love aliveIf you love Hidden Brain, please join us for our upcoming live tour! Shankar will be visiting cities across the U.S., and our listeners have the first crack at purchasing tickets. You can get yours at https://hiddenbrain.org/tour/. Use the pre-sale code BRAIN. We hope to see you there!
Chapter 1: What are the key insights about keeping love alive?
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.
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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 slash 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.
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Chapter 2: How can couples maintain passion over time?
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 Aaron has pondered this question for decades. Arthur Aaron, 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?
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.
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?
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 that 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.
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Chapter 3: What role does boredom play in relationships?
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?
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.
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?
Well, we've shown that there's a whole bunch of evolutionary work. One main evolutionary thing is survival. The other is growth, change, expansion, what we call expansion. 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.
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?
Well, yes, but they also become part of us. So their abilities and their resources, we actually mix up with our own. We've done a lot of research showing that we mix up memories, we mix up who has what qualities, all sorts of stuff. I sometimes think I know things my partner knows that I don't, or that sort of thing.
So you feel you know more than you did, you feel you have more resources than you did, all sorts of things.
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Chapter 4: How does self-expansion influence romantic relationships?
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've recently fallen in love what happened. And a major thing is I discover 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 immediately.
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
In a longer intervention, Art and his colleagues went even further to engineer a feeling of closeness between two people.
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.
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.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of novelty and challenge in relationships?
Art says the key is not getting your heart rate up during the activity. It's about doing something unusual.
Chapter 6: What practical steps can couples take to keep their relationship exciting?
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.
Some of your research points toward the importance of engaging in activities with your partner that involve humor. Why would this be important, Dart?
Well, that'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.
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?
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.
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