Arthur Aron
speaker
91 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Arthur Aron’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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It makes you like them better, feel more close to them. It increases your passionate love for your partner.
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.
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 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 Colorado River in the Grand Canyon on a boat.
you know on a floating boat with about seven or eight other people and with a friend of ours and uh 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 you when it's difficult and you overcome the difficulties that's a big plus too that's expanding
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. And we really enjoy the do-ness, the change.
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.
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 had some small discussion. Oh, hi, how are you? I don't remember what name I used. And we talked about what we did, 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.
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.
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 half to do something from the other items. And every week to spend a 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 showed much bigger increase in the quality of their relationships than the other one.
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.
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 25 feet 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.
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.
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.
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.
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