There are a lot of firsts at the beginning of a relationship. The first date. The first kiss. The first time you stay over. The first weekend away. The first time you meet each other’s friends. The first holiday, first argument, first festival together, first time you cook together and perhaps the first time you realise that the other person has a completely unacceptable way of loading a washing machine.

You don’t have to manufacture these firsts. They simply arrive because the relationship is new. Almost everything you do together is something you haven’t done together before.

Then, gradually, the firsts become less frequent. You have your restaurants. Your shows. Your holidays. Your weekend habits. You know what each other likes and, just as importantly, what each other will immediately reject. You build a life that works.

That’s one of the rewards of a long relationship. But it also means something that once happened automatically now requires a little effort: doing something neither of you has done before.

Novelty has an unfair advantage

Think about how easily you remember the first time you did something compared with the fiftieth.

You probably remember your first day at a particular job better than an ordinary Tuesday three years later. You remember your first international trip more vividly than many subsequent flights. You may remember the first time you drove a car, lived alone or stood in front of an audience.

New experiences demand our attention. We don’t yet know what is going to happen, so we pay attention to what is happening.

Familiar experiences are different. We know how they work. Our brains don’t need to record every detail because there is very little new information.

Relationships are subject to the same problem. When two people repeat the same kinds of evenings, weekends and conversations, time can start to blur. Nothing is necessarily wrong. There are simply fewer reasons for one Saturday to distinguish itself from another. A first changes that.

Your firsts don’t have to be impressive

The phrase “try something new together” tends to produce unnecessarily ambitious suggestions. Go skydiving. Travel somewhere exotic. Learn scuba diving. Climb a mountain.

All excellent options if that’s what you enjoy, but novelty doesn’t care about your budget. The first time you make sushi together is still a first. So is the first time you attempt pottery, take a dance lesson, sing karaoke, go to a part of your city neither of you knows, read poetry to each other, sleep under the stars or spend an evening communicating without speaking.

It can be even smaller than that. Cook something neither of you has eaten. Take a bus somewhere without deciding the destination. Swap wardrobes and choose what the other person wears. Buy paints and attempt each other’s portraits. Put your phones away and play a game you haven’t played since childhood.

The activity doesn’t have to be extraordinary. It just has to be new to the two of you.

Being bad at something together is surprisingly useful

There is another advantage to choosing things neither person knows how to do: you might both be terrible at them.

This is underrated. Adults spend a lot of time doing things they are competent at. We know how to do our jobs. We know how to navigate our homes and cities. We have established interests and abilities. Most of us don’t routinely volunteer to look foolish.

Doing something new removes that competence. Try learning a dance together and somebody will go in the wrong direction. Paint each other and discover that one of you apparently thinks the other has an unusually shaped head. Attempt a complicated recipe and spend half the evening trying to work out what went wrong.

Failure can be very entertaining when nothing important is at stake. It also changes the dynamic between two people who know each other extremely well. For a little while, neither person knows what they’re doing. You’re discovering the activity at the same time. You get to be beginners together.

New experiences create new versions of your partner

One of the strange things about a long relationship is that we become very familiar with particular versions of the person we’re with.

You know your partner at home. You know them at restaurants. You know them around your family, their family and your shared friends. You know what they’re like on holiday, when they’re tired, when they’re hungry and when somebody has taken their parking spot.

Put them somewhere new and you may occasionally meet a version you haven’t seen before. Perhaps they’re unexpectedly competitive at bowling. Perhaps they’re fearless on a climbing wall. Perhaps they can dance. Perhaps they absolutely cannot dance but believe otherwise. Perhaps they become fascinated by art, are brilliant at trivia or have an alarming talent for bargaining at flea markets.

This is one reason new experiences can be so enjoyable in established relationships. You’re not only discovering something new. Sometimes you’re discovering something new about someone you thought you already knew.

The easiest firsts disappear first

There is a reason novelty becomes harder over time. Once you have been together for years, you have already done a lot.

You can’t have another first date. You can’t take your first trip together again. You can’t meet each other’s parents for the first time. But you can keep creating smaller firsts.

Your first road trip without a destination. Your first dance class. Your first couples massage. Your first open mic. Your first night camping. Your first attempt at making cocktails properly. Your first time volunteering together. Your first sunrise from somewhere beautiful.

The possibilities become more specific, but they don’t disappear. You simply have to start looking for them.

There’s another kind of first

Not every first needs to involve going somewhere or learning something. Long relationships can have intimate firsts too.

The first time you tell your partner something you’ve never told anyone. The first time you ask for something you’ve always been too embarrassed to ask for. The first time you deliberately create an evening around each other’s pleasure. The first time you try a different way of being affectionate. The first time you talk openly about something you’ve always assumed rather than discussed.

Being together for a long time doesn’t mean you have exhausted intimacy. Familiarity can actually make exploration easier because trust already exists. You know each other well enough to be curious without needing to perform.

There may be far more undiscovered territory between two people than either realises.

Make a rule: one first a month

You don’t need to turn novelty into another relationship obligation. There is no need for a spreadsheet titled New Experiences Q4. But there is a simple experiment worth trying.

Once a month, do something together that neither of you has done before.

That’s twelve firsts a year. Some will be disappointing. Some you’ll never do again. One may become something you love and repeat for years. Another may become a story that starts with, “Remember that terrible idea we had?”

All of them give the year a little more texture. And twelve firsts doesn’t seem like much until you imagine doing it for ten years. That’s 120 new experiences with the same person. 

You can know someone without being finished with them

Long relationships inevitably lose some novelty. That’s not a failure. The person who once felt mysterious becomes the person whose coffee order you can make without asking. Uncertainty gets replaced by knowledge, and novelty by familiarity. There is something beautiful about that.

But perhaps familiarity doesn’t have to mean that the period of discovery is over. There are still places neither of you has been. Things neither of you has tried. Questions neither of you has asked. Versions of yourselves that haven’t had a reason to appear yet. You don’t need to become different people to keep a relationship interesting.

Every now and then, you just need to put the two people you already are into a situation you’ve never been in before. So ask your partner a question today: When was the last time we did something for the first time? If neither of you can remember, you’ve just found something to do.

Spurkle helps couples keep discovering things to do together – from something you can try tonight to experiences worth planning for later. There are still plenty of firsts left.