4 Mind-Blowing Ways to Strengthen Your Relationship (All Backed by Science!)

Shawn Stevenson (0:00)

My wife and I just celebrated our 19 year wedding anniversary and 22 years together. And it got me thinking about the science going on behind the scenes on why we still like each other. Why do we keep wanting to do this? Why do we have such a healthy and thriving relationship? Because as you know, relationships can be incredibly complex, dysfunctional, but they can also be powerful and loving and supportive and add to our longevity in ways that nothing else can. And so I put together four mind-blowing science-backed ways to strengthen your relationship. And I dug around in our relationship to find out some of these things that we were doing often unconsciously that many other successful couples are doing as well. And I think that these are going to be incredibly helpful, but they're also going to be fascinating. Number one to kick things off is based on an intriguing study that was titled, Let's Stay Home and Watch TV, The Benefits of Shared Media Use for Close Relationships that was published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. The study found that couples who share media consumption, like watching specific shows together, had higher levels of closeness, relationship satisfaction, and commitment. And this was seen, and this is very important, this was seen especially among couples who didn't share many mutual friends. So number one on our list is to experience imaginary worlds together. Now there's a reason why we bond over movies and television shows. According to scientists, it's because when we watch a show or movie with someone that we're close to, it helps to build something called a shared identity. When you're building a relationship with someone, having shared experiences and shared social connections enhances the quality and strength of the relationship. Amazingly, shared experiences of relationships with characters on television deepen that bond as well. Whether it's a shared love or hope for a character or a shared, I can't stand them for a character. It helps to deepen that shared identity as you're experiencing it together. Let's take having a favorite show that you watch together, and it tends to go through these stages. At first, we both love this show.

Then it evolves to Wednesday night is our night to watch this show. And eventually, it becomes don't watch that show without me. By engaging in this experience over time, couples accumulate an entire ecosystem of shared references, routines, language, inside jokes, memories, characters whose lives that you build together and understand within your minds and as your shared identity, opinions, expectations, all of these things start to accumulate again, creating an ecosystem that you share together. It becomes a part of us. This realization hit different for me when I thought about the fact that we have so much shared language from movies that we watched together 20 years ago. In the beginnings of our relationship, they are still a frequent part of the culture in our relationship, in our household. For example, something that we say on a regular basis, for whatever reason, we find inappropriate ways to say this, but it was from a movie called Billy Madison, all right, one of Adam Sandler's first movies. And there's a scene in the movie, because Adam Sandler is just a kid who just won't grow up, where his father is telling him, hey, I've got some big news. And there's a villain who works for his father, the villain of the story, Eric. And Billy Madison played by Adam Sandler, his dad says, I've got big news. And Billy says, and goes over to Eric, goes right to his belly. Oh, Eric must be pregnant. It's gonna be a soccer player. He's rubbing his belly. I can feel the kicks. He's gonna be a soccer player. Yes, he is. Yes, he is.

So in our relationship, frequently we'll say, he's gonna be a soccer player.

All kinds of different situations, different contexts. I don't know why, but it just stuck. It's a shared memory, and we go right back to that moment. Watching that movie at my apartment in Ferguson, Missouri, no matter where we are in the world. And the same thing with Happy Gilmore. We had an Adam Sandler era that I introduced her to. It was a big part of my growing up. So I introduced her, I put on a game. Happy Gilmore. It's all in the hips. It's all in the hips. You know, this hockey player turning to golf. And there are so many more examples like this in our relationship. You know, one of the early things that we did was watch The Lord of the Rings movies together. And we've brought language from watching those films into our relationship that again, is still part of our lives on a regular basis. You know, especially Smeagol, you know, AKA Gollum. It's a big part of our relationship. We'll say this on a regular basis. Gives it to us, my pr... She doesn't say it like me, of course, which would be mad creepy. But you know, gives it to us, my precious, my preciouses. We'll just say my precious here and there. And it's a part of our relationship. So this is something that we experience oftentimes, but we don't realize what's going on behind the scenes. And it's all rooted in our shared identity. Now there's another study that I want you to know about. This was cited in the journal, Personal Relationships, and it was titled, The Role of Shared TV Watching in Couples' Daily Shared Reality. The researchers examined the construct of this shared reality, and pointing to it's essentially the feeling that we're not merely experiencing the same thing. We're experiencing it in a similar way. And this is very important when examining this phenomenon. Two people can sit beside each other watching the same television, and have two completely separate psychological experiences. A shared reality, on the other hand, means something more similar to, you saw what I saw, you felt what I felt. You get why this is hilarious, or you get why this is tragic. We interpret that character the same way. Now, this fits a much larger psychological literature, showing that humans have a fundamental motivation to establish commonality in our inner states. Our feelings, our beliefs, our interpretations, our concerns, we're driven to share these things with other people.