It mattered more when someone was standing next to you
Two new studies asked hundreds of people in relationships about the moments that stopped them in their tracks. The ones they’d shared were the ones that showed up in the relationship.
Think of the last time something genuinely stopped you. A sky doing something ridiculous on the drive home. A piece of music that arrived somewhere behind your ribs before you’d decided anything about it. A view at the top of a hill that was worth the hill.
Psychologists call that awe: the feeling of meeting something vast enough that your usual frame doesn’t quite hold it. It’s been studied for a while now, mostly as a solo experience — what it does to a person’s sense of self, their attention, their openness.
A paper published this week asked a narrower question. Not what does awe do to you, but who were you with.
What they actually did
Researchers led by Matteo Perini, a PhD candidate at the Behavioural Science Institute at Radboud University, ran two online studies with people in romantic relationships. The first had 198 participants, all of whom reported being currently in love. The second had 306, with no such requirement.
In both, people answered questions about two different things that are easy to blur together: how readily they experience awe in daily life in general, and how much awe they experience with their partner. Then they answered questions about the relationship — satisfaction, and how closely their own sense of self overlapped with their partner’s, measured with an unexpectedly charming task: adjusting two circles — one you, one them — until the amount they overlapped looked about right.
The second study added more: relationship flourishing, which is about shared meaning and growth rather than simply having a nice time. Willingness to sacrifice for the other person. And — this is the careful part — shared amusement, plus how often the couple did awe-adjacent things like visiting somewhere new. The researchers wanted to know whether shared awe was doing anything that “we have fun together” and “we go places” weren’t already doing.
What they found
Shared awe held up. In the second study it predicted relationship satisfaction even after shared amusement and the frequency of awe-related outings were accounted for. It also predicted self-other overlap, willingness to sacrifice, and flourishing.
Flourishing was the strongest thread. “I was surprised by how strongly shared awe was related to relationship flourishing,” Perini told PsyPost. In that second study, shared awe on its own accounted for about half of the variation in it — more than he’d expected, and, he notes, not simply because the two questionnaires were measuring the same thing in different words.
Then there’s the finding that made us sit up. When general awe and shared awe were put into the same model, a person’s individual tendency toward awe stopped predicting anything positive. In the second study it turned slightly the other way.
Perini is appropriately cautious about that: he’d treat it with care until someone replicates it. But he raises the possibility gently — awe may do the most for a relationship when it’s something two people are inside together, rather than something one person mostly finds elsewhere.
What the study can’t tell us
The researchers are unusually clear about their own limits, and it’s worth repeating them rather than tucking them into a footnote.
Both studies are cross-sectional — a snapshot, not a film. As Perini puts it, they can’t establish that shared awe causes better relationships, and the reverse is entirely plausible: people already in a close, satisfying relationship may simply be more likely to experience their life together as wondrous. Everything is self-reported, and only one partner in each couple answered. The team has since run a separate experiment with pairs that they say points more directly at cause, but that work isn’t published yet, so it isn’t evidence anyone can lean on today.
And this is a study of romantic couples. It doesn’t tell us what happens between friends, or siblings, or the person you always end up talking to at the school gate.
Why this one stayed with us
Because it quietly declines to be a technique.
Perini says it plainly: he wouldn’t translate this into couples needing to chase spectacular experiences. What he offers instead is much softer — that there may be value in making room for wonder together. Nature, art, music, learning something new. Or, in the line we keep returning to, simply encountering something familiar in a different way.
That last one costs nothing and requires no plan. It is also, he suggests, where long relationships are most vulnerable, because familiarity slides so easily into taking someone for granted.
There’s a tension here we’d rather name than dodge. Nagi is designed as a private space — no name, no email, check-ins kept on your device rather than tied to your name. And here’s a study whose whole point is that some things count for more when they’re shared.
We don’t think those are in conflict. A quiet, honest record of your own weeks isn’t an alternative to other people. It’s often how you notice you’ve drifted from them. The four-tap check-in — mood, sleep, energy, a few seconds — isn’t measuring your relationships and doesn’t claim to. But patterns have a way of pointing outward. Three flat weeks in a row is information. So is realising that the days that felt different were the days you weren’t alone in them.
Nagi can’t hand you a moment of wonder. Nothing can, reliably. What a record can occasionally do is show you when you last had one.
A gentle note
If you’re reading this without a partner, or in a stretch where wonder feels a long way off, please don’t take a study about couples as a verdict on your life. It isn’t one. Awe isn’t a duty, and it doesn’t arrive on request — and the version of this that involves standing next to a friend, or a sister, or a dog, in front of something big, wasn’t measured here but isn’t ruled out either.
The finding, held loosely, is a small and kind one: the good stuff seems to travel further when someone else saw it too.
Worth pointing at the sky occasionally, then. Even if nobody says anything.
If you want a private place to start noticing your own patterns, Nagi is on Google Play and the App Store — or in your browser at app.nagiandme.app. The first 15 messages are free. No name, no email. Just you, checking in.
— The Nagi team
Source: Couples who share awe-inspiring experiences report greater relationship flourishing, PsyPost, 28 August 2026. Underlying study: Perini, M., Mier, L., van Schie, H., de Groot, J., & Karremans, J., “United in wonder: shared awe is associated with satisfaction and depth in romantic relationships”, The Journal of Positive Psychology (2026). Two cross-sectional online studies, n = 198 and n = 306; all measures self-reported by one partner only. Stated limitations: the design cannot establish cause or direction, and the individual-awe finding awaits replication.
Nagi is a mental health companion, not a medical device, and nothing here is medical advice. If you’re struggling, please reach out to a professional or someone you trust.