Most advice for a relationship that has gone a little flat converges on the same prescription: do something new together. Book the surprise weekend, take the pottery class, find a restaurant neither of you has tried. The promise is that novelty will do for an established couple what it did at the start, reviving some of the charge that familiarity has worn down.

This one is not just magazine filler; it has a research pedigree. It descends from Art Aron’s self-expansion model, which holds that we are drawn to relationships that enlarge us, and that a partnership feels most alive when it keeps adding to who we are. The model’s most cited support is a 2000 study by Aron and colleagues in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, in which couples randomly assigned to a novel, mildly arousing task – crawling across a gym mat while joined at the wrist and ankle – reported higher relationship quality afterward than couples given a mundane one. Even the pop-culture version, the shaky-bridge lore about misattribution of arousal, comes out of the same tradition.

So the idea is sound in outline. What a 2025 pair of experiments in Behavioral Sciences by Rhonda Balzarini, Anya Sharma, and Amy Muise, at Texas State and York University, adds is a cleaner test of how much a single dose actually buys you. The authors used virtual reality to hold everything constant except novelty. In the first study, 93 couples took a novel VR hot-air-balloon safari or watched the same scene over video chat; in the second, 142 couples rode a novel VR gondola through the Swiss Alps or sat in front of mundane VR porch scenery. Each experience lasted about six minutes, after which partners rated their mood, closeness, and satisfaction separately.

Novelty did something. Across both studies it reliably reduced boredom and produced a bump in in-the-moment closeness, and it created a stronger sense of “presence,” of being absorbed in the experience. But the effect on self-expansion itself was small and mostly indirect, running through how immersed people felt rather than through novelty directly, and relationship satisfaction did not move in either study. The exciting activity reliably shifted how the evening felt without shifting how people rated the relationship it belonged to.

It would be a mistake to read this as a debunking. A 2025 review of self-expansion theory in Social and Personality Psychology Compass by Emery and colleagues finds the broader model well-supported: couples who keep growing together do tend to do better. The interesting thing about the VR experiments is the gap they expose between two claims that usually travel together – that novelty lifts the mood of an evening, and that novelty lifts the relationship. The first turns out to be easy to produce on demand. The second did not follow from a single arousing activity.

The caveats: the samples were young and short-term – averaging around twenty years old and about two years together – so there was less accumulated boredom to relieve than the target audience for this advice usually has. The manipulation was one six-minute session in a lab, with no in-person control, and a VR gondola is plainly not a weekend in the mountains. This is a clean demonstration of a narrow point, not a verdict on date nights.

Still, the narrow point is useful, because it tells you what novelty is for. What actually moved in these experiments was mood and momentary connection, carried by shared attention – being genuinely present in the same thing at the same time. That rhymes with something I’ve written about in the context of savoring: the noticing, not the event, tends to do the relational work. It also fits the emergent-love picture in which attraction is cultivated rather than rediscovered. If presence is the ingredient, then an ordinary activity done with full attention may beat an extraordinary one done half-checked-out – which is not what the novel first date framing would predict.

So treat novelty as a mood lever, not a cure. It is a good tool for lifting a dull stretch, and a weak one for raising the baseline of a relationship that needs more than a change of scene. The next time a new experience brings you closer, it’s worth asking which part did it: the novelty, or the fact that for once you were both fully paying attention?