How to Keep a Relationship Exciting (What the Research Says)

The most reliable way to keep a relationship exciting is to keep doing new things together, on purpose and often. Decades of relationship research point to the same lever: novelty. Couples who share new, slightly exciting experiences report more satisfaction and even more attraction than couples who only do familiar, comfortable things. Below is what the science actually says and a practical system to put it to work.

The good news buried in that is that excitement is not something you either have or lose. It is something you generate, in small repeatable doses, and the doses do not have to be big.

Is it normal for a relationship to get boring?

Yes. It is one of the most common experiences in long-term relationships, and it is not a verdict on the relationship. Early on, everything is new, and that newness produces a natural charge. As the relationship settles, routine takes over and the charge fades. That flat feeling is a signal to add new experiences rather than a sign anything is broken.

Part of the drift is just how we spend our time. The American Time Use Survey shows adults pour roughly half of their leisure hours into watching TV, a lot of it side by side and mostly silent. That is a comfortable groove and a boring one, and it is where a lot of long relationships quietly settle.

What does the research say keeps a relationship exciting?

Novelty and shared new experiences, more than anything else. This is the most robust finding in the area, and it has a name: self-expansion.

Arthur Aron and colleagues ran a series of well-known studies, summarized in overviews from the American Psychological Association, showing that couples assigned to do a new and challenging activity together rated their relationships more highly afterward than couples assigned a pleasant but familiar one. In follow-up work, the novel-activity couples even reported higher relationship quality and attraction weeks later. The mechanism is that doing new things together expands each person's sense of self and links that growth to the partner, which reads as excitement.

The other pillar comes from the Gottman Institute, whose decades of couples research emphasize the small stuff: turning toward each other's little bids for attention, keeping playfulness and fondness alive, and maintaining a strong ratio of positive to negative interactions. Their research on what they call the "magic ratio" found that stable, happy couples maintained roughly five positive interactions for every negative one during conflict. Excitement, in other words, is not only fireworks. It is a steady diet of attention and play.

Lever	What the research shows	How to use it
Novelty	New shared activities raise satisfaction and attraction	Try one new thing together each week
Play	Playfulness and fondness sustain long-term bonds	Add games, jokes, small competitions
Curiosity	Turning toward bids builds connection over time	Keep asking real questions
Consistency	Small positive interactions outweigh grand gestures	Aim for many small ones over rare big ones

Lever 1: add novelty on a schedule

Because novelty fades on its own, you have to reintroduce it deliberately. Once a week, do one thing the two of you have never done. A new food, a new route, a new game, a skill you will both be bad at. It does not need to be expensive or elaborate. The cheap date night ideas list is full of new experiences that cost almost nothing, which matters because the research is clear that novelty drives connection while price does not.

Lever 2: bring back play and small competition

Play is what long relationships lose first and miss most. A little friendly competition is one of the easiest ways to get it back, because a scoreboard instantly gives an ordinary evening stakes and energy. This is exactly where our app is built to help.

That's So Us, an iOS app with six couples games built from your own answers, photos, and voices, is designed to be a low-effort novelty engine for couples who have been together a while. Because every round is generated from your own answers, memories, and voices, it stays fresh instead of turning into a static deck you memorize. One game has you guess how close your partner landed on a hidden question. Another has you record impressions of each other and score them. There is a winner every time, and every game ends on a designed card you can save. It is playful and a little competitive by design, which is precisely the pair of ingredients long relationships run low on.

For more on how competition and games specifically fight the boredom, how to make date night fun again covers the date-night version of the reset.

Lever 3: stay curious about a person you already know

You have not run out of things to learn about your partner. You have run out of the habit of asking. Curiosity is a form of attention, and attention is what the Gottman research keeps pointing to. Make a standing practice of asking questions you have genuinely never asked. The set in questions to ask your partner is built for long-term couples who think they already know everything about each other and are usually wrong.

A note on "exciting" versus "connected"

There is an important distinction here. Keeping a relationship exciting is about novelty and play. Feeling like roommates who have drifted apart is a different problem that needs reconnection rather than more fun. If what you are feeling is distance rather than boredom, the fix is more about attention and repair, and how to reconnect with your partner is aimed squarely at that. This post is for couples who are fine but flat and want the charge back.

The system: keep-it-exciting in four habits

Put the research to work with a system you can actually sustain:

1. One new thing a week. Small counts. The novelty is the point, not the scale.
2. Keep a game or competition running. Play is the ingredient long relationships lose first.
3. Ask one real question you never have. Curiosity is renewable if you make it a habit.
4. Protect the small positive moments. Turn toward the little bids. Five good ones outweigh one bad one.

None of this requires a personality transplant or a bigger budget. It requires refusing to let the relationship run entirely on autopilot. The couples who stay excited about each other are not luckier. They just keep adding small doses of new, and the research says that is most of the secret.