A Marriage Needs Something Larger Than Itself

Saturday, August 29, 2026.

Most couples do not need another date night.

They need to look up.

This is not an argument against dinner reservations, babysitters, small plates, or desserts arriving with two spoons.

Date nights can be lovely.

But they often leave the couple exactly where they began: sitting across from each other, examining the relationship.

How are we doing?

Are we still connected?

Why don’t we have more fun?

The modern marriage is already one of the most closely monitored institutions in human history.

We track its satisfaction, communication, erotic temperature, division of labor, emotional availability, and preferred method of loading a dishwasher.

Sometimes the marriage does not need further examination.

Sometimes it needs an encounter with something that is not the marriage.

A mountain. A storm. A cathedral. A piece of music that leaves both partners silent.

The ocean in February, behaving as though human beings had never been invented.

Something vast enough to interrupt the exhausting project of being ourselves.

New research suggests that couples who experience awe together report greater relationship satisfaction, passionate love, closeness, willingness to sacrifice, and—most strikingly—relationship flourishing.

Not merely happiness.

Flourishing.

What Awe Does to Us

Researchers describe awe as the emotion produced when we encounter something vast that exceeds our usual understanding of the world.

That vastness may be physical: the Grand Canyon, the Milky Way, a whale surfacing beside a boat.

But awe can also be artistic, intellectual, spiritual, or moral.

We may experience it while listening to music, learning something that reorganizes our understanding, witnessing extraordinary courage, entering an ancient building, or holding a newborn whose existence seems statistically preposterous.

Awe confronts us with more reality than our existing mental furniture can accommodate.

For a moment, the self becomes smaller.

This is not humiliation. It is relief.

Most of us spend our days trapped inside a rather insistent narrator concerned with our schedules, injuries, grievances, unfinished tasks, misunderstood intentions, and whether somebody’s tone was necessary.

Awe lowers the narrator’s microphone.

Bestowed attention moves outward.

The boundaries of the self become less rigid.

We become more receptive, curious, and sometimes more generous.

A major review of awe research identified diminished self-focus, greater social connection, social integration, and heightened meaning among its possible psychological pathways.

But a new study published in The Journal of Positive Psychology asks a particularly intimate question:

What happens when life partners become smaller together?

Shared Awe Is Not Just Having Fun

The researchers conducted two preregistered online studies involving romantically involved adults.

In the first study, shared awe predicted relationship satisfaction, passionate love, and a greater sense of overlap between self and partner.

A person’s general tendency to experience awe did not provide the same relationship benefits once shared awe was considered.

The second study went further.

Shared awe was associated with satisfaction, closeness, willingness to sacrifice, reduced self-focus, and relationship flourishing.

These associations remained even after researchers accounted for shared amusement and the frequency of potentially awe-producing activities.

That distinction matters.

Awe is not merely fun with better lighting.

Couples can laugh together without being changed by what they encounter. They can travel widely while remaining psychologically at home. They can even stand before the Mediterranean and argue about where to eat.

Novelty can stimulate a relationship. Amusement can soften it. Awe appears to offer something different: an experience of shared transcendence.

For a moment, the couple is not producing the experience. They are receiving it.

They are no longer looking only at one another. They are standing beside one another, looking toward the same thing.

That may be one of the neglected postures of intimacy.

The Trouble With Making the Marriage Everything

Modern couples are asked to provide one another with an astonishing range of experiences.

A spouse should be a lover, best friend, co-parent, economic partner, confidant, intellectual companion, travel partner, emergency contact, identity witness, and preferred source of weekend entertainment.

We expect the relationship to provide security and adventure, familiarity and mystery, stability and transformation.

Then we are surprised when two ordinary human beings begin to look tired.

A marriage becomes particularly fragile when it must manufacture all its meaning internally. Every disappointment becomes evidence about the relationship. Every season of boredom becomes a verdict. Every unmet longing is delivered to the partner’s desk.

But perhaps a marriage was never meant to be a sealed emotional biosphere.

It needs a third thing—not another person, but something beyond the couple that both partners can face together.

For many couples, that larger thing was once supplied by religion, extended family, community, civic life, nature, art, or a shared moral undertaking.

Some of those structures have weakened. The couple is left alone in the house, expected to generate belonging, purpose, wonder, erotic vitality, and existential meaning from the same two nervous systems.

It is too much weight for intimacy to carry.

A marriage needs windows.

Satisfaction Is Not Flourishing

The strongest finding in the second study concerned relationship flourishing.

Shared awe alone accounted for roughly half the variance in flourishing, according to the lead author. That does not establish causation, but it is a striking association.

Relationship satisfaction asks whether the relationship is meeting our needs.

Relationship flourishing asks something larger.

Are we growing here?

Does this bond deepen our lives?

Are we participating in something meaningful together?

A satisfying marriage may be pleasant and stable. A flourishing marriage gives the partners a sense that their lives together possess direction, depth, and significance.

This may explain why amusement alone was not enough.

Fun helps couples enjoy the life they already have. Awe may change their perception of what that life is.

The Couples Who Still Look Up

Long-term love creates a peculiar visual problem.

We become so familiar with our partners that we stop seeing them.

We see the partner who left the cupboard open. The partner who asks questions during the final three minutes of a television program. The partner whose once-charming habits have completed the long journey from endearing to prosecutable.

Familiarity is one of love’s great achievements. It is also one of its occupational hazards.

Shared awe may interrupt this domestic reduction.

When partners encounter something moving together, they do not merely see the object of wonder. They see each other responding to it.

You notice your wife’s face while the orchestra reaches the passage she loves.

You watch your husband become quiet at the edge of the ocean.

You see the person beside you absorbed, humbled, delighted, or moved beyond speech.

For a moment, the partner becomes mysterious again—not because you know less about them, but because you remember that knowing someone is not the same as exhausting them.

The researchers are now studying what they call “partner-induced awe”: the experience of feeling wonder toward one’s romantic partner, or child, for that matter.

That may sound lofty until we remember how many marriages began there.

Most people once regarded their partner as improbable. They were fascinated by a mind, a body, a history, a way of moving through the world. They could not quite believe this person existed—and, more astonishingly, had chosen them.

Domestic life does not necessarily destroy that perception. But it buries it beneath repetition.

Awe may be one way of digging it out.

When Only One Partner Remains Enchanted

One of the study’s more curious findings requires caution.

After shared awe was taken into account, a person’s individual tendency to experience awe was negatively associated with relationship satisfaction. The lead researcher warned that this result needs replication.

Still, it suggests an interesting clinical possibility.

What happens when one partner remains enchanted by the world while the other no longer joins them?

One wants to stop and watch the moon rise. The other wants to beat the traffic.

One hears the music. The other checks the phone.

The problem is not that couples need identical interests. They do not. The problem arises when bids for shared wonder are repeatedly declined.

“Come see this” may be one of the simplest bids for connection in a marriage.

It means: Leave your private world for a moment. Stand where I am standing. Let this reach both of us.

A partner need not manufacture amazement on command. But chronic indifference carries a message: the world as experienced by the other person is not worth entering.

Over time, the enchanted partner may begin traveling alone—not necessarily to other places, but into regions of beauty, curiosity, and meaning no longer shared by the marriage.

You Do Not Need to Chase the Sublime

None of this means couples should turn awe into another wellness assignment.

Marriage has already survived communication exercises, scheduled intimacy, gratitude journals, attachment-style quizzes, and several generations of decorative pillows commanding everyone to “Live, Laugh, Love.”

Awe resists compulsory enthusiasm.

Nor must couples pursue expensive or spectacular experiences. The study’s lead author cautioned against precisely that interpretation.

Wonder is not confined to Antarctica, eclipses, or seats close enough to see Yo-Yo Ma perspire.

Couples can encounter awe through nature, music, art, spiritual practice, architecture, scientific discovery, collective ritual, or acts of courage.

The essential question is not, “Where should we go?”

It is, “What still makes us stop?”

For one couple, it may be the ocean during a storm. For another, a choir in a church neither partner attends.

It may be watching migrating birds, walking through an old cemetery, seeing Saturn through a borrowed telescope, volunteering after a disaster, or listening to a child ask a question neither adult can answer.

Even grief can produce a terrible kind of awe.

So can birth, recovery, forgiveness, and the realization that two people have survived a season they once believed would destroy them.

Awe is not always pleasant.

It is larger than pleasant.

What the Study Cannot Tell Us

The research has important limitations.

Both studies were cross-sectional and relied on self-reports from one partner. They cannot establish that shared awe causes better relationships.

The reverse may be true. People in satisfying, emotionally alive relationships may simply be more likely to experience their lives together as awe-inspiring.

Future research will need to study both partners, follow couples over time, and experimentally test whether shared awe produces lasting change.

The lead researcher has reported a separate, not-yet-published experiment in which exposure to awe was associated with deeper connection between participants. Because that study has not yet been published or independently evaluated, it should be regarded as preliminary.

For now, the evidence supports an association and a compelling hypothesis—not a prescription.

That is still worth taking seriously.

A Marriage Needs a Third Thing

Couples therapists often focus on what happens between two people.

Who pursues? Who withdraws? Who criticizes? Who defends? Who carries the emotional labor? Who repairs?

These questions matter. But sometimes the most useful movement is not further inward. It is outward.

A marriage needs a third thing.

A landscape.

A body of knowledge.

A spiritual life.

A community.

A musical tradition.

A form of service.

A beautiful and difficult project neither partner could accomplish alone.

Something that does not belong exclusively to either person, but before which both can stand.

This relieves partners of having to remain endlessly fascinating to one another. It also gives them somewhere to direct their love besides back into the relationship itself.

They become companions in the presence of something larger.

Perhaps that is why shared awe seems connected not merely to pleasure, but to flourishing. It reminds two people that their marriage is not the entire world.

It is a way of entering the world together.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is shared awe in a relationship?

Shared awe occurs when partners encounter something vast, moving, or difficult to absorb within their usual understanding of the world. It might arise through nature, music, art, spiritual practice, learning, collective ritual, or witnessing an extraordinary act of courage or kindness.

Does shared awe improve relationships?

The current research found that shared awe was associated with relationship satisfaction, passionate love, closeness, willingness to sacrifice, and relationship flourishing. However, the studies were cross-sectional, so they cannot prove that shared awe caused those outcomes.

How can couples experience more awe together?

Couples can make room for experiences that invite attention rather than merely provide entertainment: walking beneath a dark sky, visiting the ocean, hearing live music, entering an unfamiliar sacred or historic space, learning something together, or participating in meaningful service. The experience need not be expensive or spectacular.

Is shared awe the same as trying new things together?

Not quite. Novelty can be stimulating, and amusement can be bonding. Awe involves an additional sense of vastness, wonder, or meaning that temporarily shifts attention beyond the self. The study found that shared awe predicted relationship outcomes even after shared amusement and awe-related activities were considered.

Why Work With Daniel?

Couples often seek therapy because they have become trapped inside the problem-solving machinery of their relationship. Every conversation returns to the same injuries, defensive positions, and disappointments.

Those patterns must be addressed. But couples therapy should also help partners recover curiosity, admiration, shared meaning, and a life together that is larger than conflict management.

Daniel Dashnaw works intensively with couples facing disconnection, infidelity, neurodivergence, chronic conflict, and the loss of emotional or erotic vitality.

His approach combines practical relationship science with differentiation: helping partners remain fully themselves while becoming more capable of meeting one another.

Perhaps the opposite of taking someone for granted is not gratitude alone.

Perhaps it is learning to stand beside the person you know best and encounter something neither of you can explain.

Ready to begin? Schedule a Free Intro Call.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Monroy, M., & Keltner, D. (2023). Awe as a pathway to mental and physical health. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 18(2), 309–320. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916221094856

Perini, M., Mier, L., van Schie, H., de Groot, J. H. B., & Karremans, J. (2026). United in wonder: Shared awe is associated with satisfaction and depth in romantic relationships. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2026.2704815