Shared awe deepens romantic relationships, a new study finds.

You might think relationship advice has already exhausted the obvious suggestions. Communicate more. Make time for each other. Put your phones away. Now researchers in the Netherlands have added something rather more glamorous to the list: go and be amazed together. A new study by Matteo Perini and colleagues at Radboud University, published in The Journal of Positive Psychology, suggests that sharing moments of awe with your partner is associated with greater relationship satisfaction and a deeper sense of connection.

Awe, in this context, means that deliciously odd feeling you get when something seems vast, beautiful or meaningful enough to make your everyday worries briefly look rather small. It could be Beethoven’s Ninth, a spectacular night sky, a great painting, a dramatic landscape, a live performance or even watching someone you admire do something extraordinary.

The researchers arrived at their conclusions through two preregistered studies involving 198 people in the first study and 306 in the second, giving a total of 504 participants. They asked people about the awe they experienced with their partners, their general tendency to experience awe, and how satisfied they were with their relationships. They also measured something psychologists call “self other overlap”, essentially the extent to which you feel that your partner has become part of your own sense of self. Participants indicated this using overlapping circles labelled “Me” and “My Partner”, which is scientifically respectable but does make you wonder whether relationship therapy has finally discovered Venn diagrams. The results showed that shared awe predicted relationship satisfaction even after accounting for a person’s general tendency to experience awe. In the second study, the researchers also found links with willingness to sacrifice, self other overlap and relationship flourishing, with flourishing appearing to be the strongest pathway connecting shared awe with satisfaction.

Perini, a PhD candidate in social and cultural psychology at Radboud University’s Behavioural Science Institute, has urged caution about turning the findings into a prescription to pursue spectacular experiences constantly. The point is less that you need to book a trip to Patagonia every weekend and more that you might benefit from occasionally noticing something remarkable together. Previous research supports the broader idea that awe can reduce self focus and encourage social connection, although the effects and mechanisms are still being investigated.

So, you probably do not need to transform your relationship into an endless sequence of sunsets, symphonies and spiritually significant encounters. You can simply pay attention to the moments when something makes both of you stop and think, “Wow.” That might happen in an art gallery, during a concert, on a walk, while travelling, watching an unusually spectacular storm or listening to your partner tell a story you have somehow never heard properly before. The interesting part of the Dutch research is that the benefit appears to lie not merely in feeling awe, but in sharing it.

When you turn your attention towards something bigger than yourself at the same time as the person you love, the research suggests, the psychological distance between “me” and “you” may become a little smaller. And if that sounds suspiciously like a good excuse to drag your partner outside to look at the stars, the scientists may have just given you one.