Couples who share awe-inspiring experiences report greater relationship flourishing

Experiencing feelings of awe alongside a romantic partner is linked to greater relationship satisfaction and depth. A recent study suggests that these shared moments of wonder foster a stronger sense of connection and relational growth, providing benefits beyond what individual experiences of awe offer. The research was published in The Journal of Positive Psychology.

Awe is an emotion triggered by encountering something vast that challenges a person’s existing understanding of the world. This feeling can arise from seeing a breathtaking natural landscape, listening to a moving piece of music, or experiencing a moment of profound scientific insight. Compared to simple happiness, awe tends to be a self-transcendent emotion. It reduces a person’s focus on themselves and encourages open-mindedness.

A 2022 review detailed how experiencing awe shifts attention outward, fostering social connection, a heightened sense of meaning, and prosocial behavior. Expanding on these personal effects, a study covered by PsyPost in 2022 indicated that awe increases a person’s motivation to pursue their authentic self, driven by these very feelings of self-transcendence.

While prior research highlights the personal benefits of awe, studies focusing on individually induced awe in romantic contexts have yielded mixed results. The authors of the new study reasoned that awe might be most impactful for couples when it is a shared experience. Sharing emotional events is known to intensify feelings and help partners build intimacy.

“My research focuses on awe and its relationship to psychological depth,” said lead author Matteo Perini, a PhD candidate in social and cultural psychology at the Behavioural Science Institute at Radboud University. “One idea that has become central to my work is that awe may be one route into depth: by confronting us with something vast that goes beyond our current frame of reference, it may push us to revise our mental models and engage with things at a deeper level.”

“This study extends that question into romantic relationships: can awe, when experienced together, help two people connect more deeply?” Perini added.

The research involved two online studies. The first study recruited 198 adults who were in a romantic relationship. To participate, individuals had to be currently in love and report high levels of passionate love. The participants completed questionnaires measuring their general tendency to experience awe in daily life, the awe they experienced specifically with their partner, and their overall relationship satisfaction.

The scientists also measured self-other overlap, which is the degree to which a person feels their own identity merges with their partner’s identity. Participants indicated this overlap by adjusting a digital image of two circles, one representing themselves and the other representing their partner, until the circles reflected their perceived level of connection.

The authors found that shared awe positively predicted relationship satisfaction, passionate love, and self-other overlap. When the researchers looked at general awe and shared awe together in the same statistical model, only shared awe remained a positive predictor of these relationship outcomes. A person’s general tendency to experience awe on their own did not account for unique positive variance when shared awe was considered.

To expand on these initial findings, the researchers conducted a second study with 306 romantically involved adults. In this group, participants did not have to report being currently in love. The scientists measured the same concepts as the first study but added new variables to capture different layers of relationship depth. These included relationship flourishing, which reflects a meaning-oriented dimension of relationship growth, such as seeking out shared purpose rather than just feeling pleasant.

The team also measured a person’s willingness to sacrifice for their partner and relational quiet ego. Relational quiet ego describes a state of reduced self-focus combined with greater perspective-taking and inclusivity within the relationship. To ensure shared awe was distinct from simply having fun together or doing novel things, the researchers also tracked shared amusement and the frequency of awe-related activities, such as visiting unfamiliar locations or attending collective events.

The results of the second study indicated that shared awe was a strong predictor of relationship satisfaction, even when accounting for shared amusement and the frequency of awe-related activities. Shared awe also positively predicted self-other overlap, willingness to sacrifice, relational quiet ego, and relationship flourishing.

The scientists analyzed how shared awe might link to relationship satisfaction through these different psychological pathways. They found that the association was primarily explained by indirect pathways involving relationship flourishing, self-other overlap, and a willingness to sacrifice. Relationship flourishing emerged as the strongest pathway, suggesting that shared awe is closely tied to a sense of shared meaning and relational growth. Relational quiet ego did not provide unique explanatory value in this specific model.

“I was surprised by how strongly shared awe was related to relationship flourishing,” Perini told PsyPost. “In our second study, shared awe alone accounted for about half of the variance in flourishing, which was considerably stronger than I had expected.”

“Sometimes these strong correlations are observed because two scales are very similar to each other, but in this case the two measures were substantially different, one about shared experiences of awe, and the other about meaning and growth in the relationship,” he explained.

Interestingly, when shared awe was accounted for, a person’s individual tendency to experience awe became negatively associated with relationship satisfaction.

“I would treat that particular finding cautiously until it is replicated, but it raises an interesting possibility,” Perini said. “Awe may be especially beneficial for a relationship when it becomes something partners share, rather than something one person primarily experiences outside the relationship.”

The findings are in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2025, which found that awe promotes a deep sense of psychological overlap and unity with large social groups. The new study suggests a similar merging process happens on an interpersonal level between romantic partners.

“I wouldn’t translate this into ‘couples should constantly chase spectacular experiences,’” Perini noted. “But it does suggest that there may be value in making room for wonder together, whether through nature, art, music, travel, learning something new, spiritual experiences, or simply encountering something familiar in a different way.”

The data relied solely on self-reported questionnaires from one partner in the relationship. The authors recommended that future studies collect data from both partners to see how they might agree or differ in their perceptions of shared wonder.

The researchers also noted a few details about the study’s design that affect how the results can be interpreted. “The biggest caveat is that the two studies in this paper are cross-sectional and rely on self-report, so they cannot establish that shared awe causes better relationships,” Perini explained. “The reverse is also plausible: people who are already in satisfying and deeper relationships may simply be more likely to experience their lives together as awe-inspiring.”

“Since completing this work, however, we have also run a separate experiment in which dyads were exposed to awe, and we observed that participants in the awe condition were able to connect at a deeper level,” Perini said. “Those results are not part of the present paper and we are still preparing them for publication, but they provide experimental support for the broader idea that awe can affect interpersonal depth, rather than merely being correlated with it.”

Moving forward, the researchers hope to explore the exact role these shared emotional experiences play in long-term romantic bonds. Observing couples in their daily lives or testing awe-inducing activities over time could help determine whether awe fundamentally changes the level at which people reflect and connect.

“We are currently preparing another paper on what we call partner-induced awe: the experience of feeling awe toward one’s own romantic partner,” Perini said. “Our findings suggest that this may matter even in long-term relationships.”

“To me, this pushes against the idea that awe belongs only to spectacular, once-in-a-lifetime experiences, or that it is something we direct toward powerful or distant people,” he explained. “In long-term relationships, that capacity may be particularly valuable because familiarity can so easily turn into taking the other person for granted.”

The study, “United in wonder: shared awe is associated with satisfaction and depth in romantic relationships,” was authored by Matteo Perini, Lou Mier, Hein van Schie, Jasper de Groot, and Johan Karremans.