If your relationship needs a reboot, try going on a double date.
Past studies show that self disclosure, or sharing information about yourself with your partner, can bring people closer together. But in new information presented this week at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s annual conference in Austin, Texas, researchers found that going on a double date with another couple, paired with sharing personal details, is more effective at bringing you even closer to your partner, and renewing romance.
In the study of 150 couples, the researchers conducted a “Fast Friends” experiment, which consisted of couples running through a list of questions with one another. It started with basic questions like “What is your idea of a perfect day?” and progressively got more insightful, asking questions such as “What was the most embarrassing moment in your life?” The researchers had some couple pairings discuss more in-depth questions than others, and those discussing deeper questions reported more feelings of passionate love than couples who kept to the basic questions. They also found that the more responsive a couple was to the deeper questions, the more they reported strong feelings of passionate love.
“The more that the other couple responds to your self-disclosures in a validating and caring way when on a double date, the more passionate you feel about your own relationship,” study author Keith Welker, a doctoral student at Wayne State University told Science Daily.
The researchers believe that having intimate self-disclosure conversations with other couples can make you see your partner in a new light, and feel more passionately for them than you did before.