Double dates help keep romance alive

Going on a double date may be more effective at reigniting passion in your own relationship than the classic candlelit dinner for two.

According to new research, striking up a friendship with another couple in which you discuss personal details of your life will bring you closer to your own partner.

"Passionate love is one of the first dimensions of love to decrease in couples over time as the newness of a relationship begins to wane," says Keith Welker, a doctoral student at Wayne State University.

"Relationships have widely been thought to flourish and develop in a broader network of social relationships, while emerging research has suggested that novel, arousing experiences can increase feelings of passionate love."

The new research fuses together the two research areas, showing that novel, high-self-disclosure interactions with other couples can increase feelings of passionate love. Such interactions, the researchers say, may cause us to perceive our partners and the relationship in a new light.

Indeed, perception is vital in a relationship, according to a range of new studies to be presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) annual conference in Austin. Whether we perceive a long-term commitment as marriage versus merely cohabitation can change how we respond to stress, according to one study, while our perceptions of how much our partner truly wants the best for us predicts psychological health over 10 years in another study.Welker, with his adviser Rich Slatcher, had previously studied how self-disclosure increased closeness within couples. They wanted to extend the research to investigate how self-disclosure between couples affects closeness and feelings of passionate love. "We were expecting that the formation of a friendship between two couples in the lab would increase closeness and relationship satisfaction," Welker says.

"However, we found the robustness of the effects on passionate love surprising."

Over 45 minutes, couples answered basic "get-to-know-you" questions, such as "What is your idea of a perfect day?" or "Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?"

- MNT