September 21st has always had a little extra rhythm to it in our house, mostly because my favorite song happens to be “September” by Earth, Wind & Fire. Long before our two girls were born, my wife and I decided to take that date and make it our own. Every September 21st, we would try to do something we had never done together before. It didn’t have to be expensive, elaborate, or worthy of posting somewhere. It simply had to be new to us.

Nearly 30 years later, I’m beginning to realize there may have been more wisdom in that little tradition than either of us understood when we started it.

You’ve probably heard someone say that the chemical “high” of a new relationship lasts about 18 months. I had too, so I started digging into the research, and like most good sound bites, the truth is a little more interesting. Scientists studying people who were intensely in love found activity in dopamine-rich areas of the brain associated with reward and motivation. The popular 18-month number, however, is more closely connected to research on limerence, that almost consuming early stage of romantic attraction, which researcher Dorothy Tennov estimated commonly lasts somewhere between 18 months and three years. In other words, there isn’t some biological timer that goes off at month 18 and announces, “Well, that was fun.”

What caught my attention was what researchers discovered about what happens after the newness naturally begins to fade.

Psychologist Arthur Aron and his colleagues have spent years studying what they call “self expansion,” the idea that relationships grow when another person continues to expand the way we experience ourselves and the world around us. In one fascinating series of studies, couples who participated in novel and exciting activities together experienced greater increases in relationship quality than couples who spent that same time doing ordinary, familiar activities. More recent research continues to support the connection between shared novel experiences, self expansion, reduced boredom, and stronger relationships.

That got me thinking about all the traveling my wife and I have done over the years, not only with each other, but with our daughters, family, and some of our closest friends. We’ve been incredibly blessed to see a lot of the world, and I don’t take any of it for granted. I believe God has been extraordinarily generous in the people He has placed in our lives, the opportunities He has provided, and even in the places His providence has allowed us to experience together.

But something occurred to me recently. Some of my favorite trips haven’t necessarily been the first time I visited somewhere. They’ve been the times I went back with someone who had never been there.

There is something incredible about seeing an old place through new eyes.

You notice things you walked right past the first time. Someone asks a question you never thought to ask. They get excited about something you barely remembered. Suddenly a street you’ve walked before, a restaurant you’ve eaten in, a mountain you’ve already seen, or a city you thought you knew becomes new again because you’re experiencing it through someone else.

And I think the same thing can happen with people.

After almost three decades of marriage, I know my wife pretty well. I know her expressions, her routines, what makes her laugh, what frustrates her, and probably what she’s going to say before she says it more often than she would like me to admit. That familiarity is one of the great gifts of marriage, but I wonder if it can also become one of its quiet dangers. We can become so familiar with the people closest to us that we stop being curious about them.

Maybe that’s part of what new experiences give back to us.

Put the person you’ve known for decades into a place you’ve never been, give the two of you something neither knows how to do, travel with people you’ve never traveled with before, or return somewhere familiar with your children or friends, and suddenly you get another angle on someone you thought you already knew. You see how they respond, what excites them, what scares them, what makes them laugh, what they notice, and sometimes you discover a part of them that everyday life hadn’t given you the opportunity to see.

Here’s what really fascinated me. Researchers studied people who had been married an average of 21.4 years and who still described themselves as intensely in love. When these husbands and wives looked at pictures of their spouses, researchers found activity in some of the same dopamine-rich reward areas seen in people experiencing early romantic love. It was a small, very specific group, so I’m not suggesting they discovered a magic formula for marriage. But they demonstrated something worth paying attention to: familiarity does not automatically have to extinguish fascination.

Maybe the goal isn’t to spend our lives trying to recreate the honeymoon.

Maybe it’s to never stop discovering the person we came home from the honeymoon with.

That is what September 21st has come to mean to me. What started as a fun tribute to a song I love became a reminder that some of the greatest gifts God gives us are people we will never completely finish getting to know. Our spouses change. Our children change. Our friends change. We change. Yet if we stop asking questions, stop exploring, stop laughing, stop learning, and stop putting ourselves in situations where we can see one another differently, we can miss the person standing right in front of us.

So maybe steal our tradition, even if you pick a different date.

Do something you’ve never done together. It doesn’t require an airline ticket or a passport. Take the class. Visit the place you keep driving past. Try the restaurant nobody can pronounce. Go hiking somewhere new. Invite friends along. Take your kids back to someplace you love and let them show you what you missed the first time.

Or go back to an old place with new faces.

Because nearly 30 years into this journey, I’m realizing that keeping a relationship fresh may have far less to do with constantly searching for something better and far more to do with continuing to discover what God has already graciously placed right in front of us.

Sometimes the place doesn’t need to change.

We just need another reason to see it, and each other, again.