Trying new things together is the shared willingness to keep reaching past the familiar — a new restaurant, an unfamiliar route, a hobby neither of you has done — because novel, interesting experience with a partner quietly expands who each of you is and refreshes how the relationship feels.
It is a behavioral dispositiondispositionBelonging to a person's stable character or temperament rather than being just a passing mood or a one-off reaction to a single situation.Glossary →, not a personality test: the standing readiness to treat "we've never done this" as an invitation. The new thing can be tiny or large; what matters is that it is novel or interesting and done together. The engine beneath it is self-expansion theoryself-expansionThe idea that people are basically motivated to grow the self by adding new perspectives, skills, and identities, and that close relationships are a main…Glossary → — the idea that people are motivated to grow the self, that relationships are a primary vehicle for that growth, and that the automatic expansion of early love slows once you know each other, so couples who keep generating shared novelty keep accessing it 12. It is not merely spending time together (identical hours can feel flat 10), not grand gestures, and not thrill-seeking — later work shows it is the novelty, not the racing heart, that does the work 3.
The evidence has an experimental core. Aron and colleagues found couples doing a novel, slightly absurd seven-minute task showed greater gains in relationship quality than those doing a mundane one, mediated by reduced boredom 4; an earlier ten-week study showed "exciting" shared activities beat merely "pleasant" ones 5. Tomlinson and colleagues separated self-expansion from arousalphysiological arousalBodily activation such as a racing heart or adrenaline, kept separate here from the mental sense of learning and growing that the theory treats as the active…Glossary → and found expansion, not arousal, predicts the benefit 3. Muise and colleagues link self-expanding activity to higher desire and satisfaction 6, and a 2025 VR study found novelty only pays off when it feels genuinely shared 7. A 2025 review calls the model well-supported while noting most studies are short-term 8.
Why it matters
Why it matters. Boredom in a long relationship usually means the relationship has stopped generating new experience, not that the partner is boring — and shared novelty is the everyday antidote, while improvising in unscripted situations builds confidence in the partnership itself.
How to cultivate it
How to cultivate it. Keep it small and frequent, take turns curating, do things jointly and at the same time 7, and choose interest over adrenaline 3.
The honest caveat
The honest caveat. The experiments are real but mostly short, lab-based, and Western-sampled, so the decades-long claim is reasonable extrapolation 8; causality likely runs both ways; and novelty is a supplement that lifts an already-safe bond, not a repair for contempt, neglect, or broken safety 8.