Advice to couples to simply “spend more time together” is common enough that it rarely gets questioned. Researchers Charlotte Reissman, Arthur Aron, and Merlynn Bergen decided to test it directly. In a study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships in 1993, they recruited 53 married couples and randomly assigned each one to one of three conditions for ten weeks: spend ninety minutes a week doing something the couple defined as exciting, spend the same amount of time doing something pleasant but familiar, or continue on with no special activity at all. Marital satisfaction was measured before and after, using a standard scale adjusted to account for people’s tendency to give socially desirable answers.
The results split in a way that complicates the simple advice to just spend more time together. Comparing the two activity groups combined against the no-activity control group produced no significant difference, an effect too small to treat as a real finding. In other words, being assigned to do some extra structured activity, of whatever kind, did not reliably outperform doing nothing different. But the comparison between the two activity types told a different story: couples in the exciting-activity condition showed significantly higher gains in marital satisfaction than couples in the merely-pleasant condition, a moderate-sized effect. Time together, it turned out, was not the active ingredient. The kind of time was.
This result came out of what Aron calls self-expansion theory, the idea that people are drawn to relationships and activities that broaden their sense of who they are, their skills, their perspective, their sense of the world, and that this broadening feels good in a specific, identifiable way that mere pleasant familiarity does not reproduce. A relationship that keeps offering a partner new experiences keeps supplying some of that expansion directly; a relationship that settles into a comfortable, unchanging routine offers less of it, even if the routine itself feels agreeable.
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Aron and colleagues followed up with a more tightly controlled test of the same idea, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2000. Alongside two correlational studies, a newspaper questionnaire and a door-to-door survey, both of which found that couples who reported more exciting shared activities also reported higher relationship satisfaction, the researchers ran three genuine laboratory experiments. In each one, couples were randomly assigned to complete either a novel and physically arousing task or a more mundane one, lasting as little as seven minutes, and relationship quality was measured immediately before and after. In all three experiments, couples in the novel-arousing condition showed a significantly bigger jump in experienced relationship quality than couples in the mundane condition, and a comparison against couples who did no task at all confirmed the effect was specifically due to the novel, arousing nature of the activity rather than simply doing an assigned task together.
Taken together, the two studies mean something more precise than the folk advice suggests. It is not “spending time together” in the abstract that the evidence supports. It is spending time on something that is new, engaging, and at least a little bit outside the couple’s normal routine, as opposed to something comfortable and familiar, however pleasant. A quiet, well-worn dinner routine and a highly novel new activity might both count as time together, but only one of them shows up in these studies as reliably moving the needle on how satisfied people report feeling in the relationship.
There is a real limit worth naming honestly. Follow-up research on self-expanding activities has found the resulting boost in relationship satisfaction can be short-lived, in some studies fading within a matter of hours rather than persisting for weeks. That does not undo the original finding, but it reframes what it is useful for. A single exciting outing is not a permanent fix for a struggling relationship, and the research doesn’t claim it is. What the combined evidence points to instead is a repeatable ingredient: doing something genuinely new together, again and again, rather than one dramatic gesture, appears to be what the effect actually depends on. A 2025 review in Social and Personality Psychology Compass by Lydia Emery and colleagues, surveying more than four decades of research on self-expansion theory since Aron’s original studies, describes the core finding as one of the more consistently replicated results in relationship science, even as researchers continue debating exactly why novelty produces the effect and how long any single dose of it lasts.