For a while now, I’ve been trying to take Eleanor Roosevelt’s advice to “Do one thing every day that scares you.” It turns out that using this same strategy in your marriage may help you to stay together.

This article talks about how boredom can lead partners to lose interest or stray, and that trying new things stimulates the brain to feel the way it did when you were first in love. Dr. Barbara Bartlik, an assistant professor of psychiatry at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, says that doing something “scary” causes a rush of adrenaline that can make you “feel sexier.” Helen Fisher, a research professor at Rutgers, has this advice to keep the passion: “Marry the right person, have sex with them regularly, and go out and do novel, exciting things with them.”

What do you think? Do you agree that being bored in a relationship is worse than tension or fighting? Do you think the answer is really this simple, or are there more important things than spontaneity and novelty?