Is Variety the Spice of Love?

Relationship partners do many things together. They eat dinner, watch television, discuss their days, and potentially even take art classes or travel. Different couples, however, vary in the variety of joint-activates they engage in. Some couples tend to do relatively similar activities; watching different TV shows on consecutive nights or eating slightly different dinners. Other couples tend to do relatively dissimilar or varied activities; watching TV one night, going out to dinner the following night, and playing tennis the next. Spending time together is positively correlated with relationship quality (Kilbourne, Howell, & England, 1990; Kingston & Nock, 1987; Orden & Bradburn, 1968; Orthner, 1975), but might the variety of activities couples do together matter, and if so, how? We suggest that the impact of activity-variety on relationship quality depends critically on where partners see themselves in the course of their relationship. Socio-emotional selectivity theory (Carstensen, Isaacowitz, & Charles, 1999; Carstensen, Gross, & Fun, 1997) suggests that how much time people see ahead of them (i.e., future time abundance) varies over the life course. Perceptions of future time abundance, in turn, impact what people value. When people see lots of time ahead of them, for instance, they value feeling excited, whereas when they see little time ahead, they value feeling calm (Mogilner, Aaker, & Kamvar, 2012; Mogilner, Kamvar, & Aaker, 2011).