Think about your closest friend. Now think about how the friendship actually formed. Odds are it wasn’t a series of scheduled catch-ups - it was something you did together: a trip, a project, a kitchen disaster, a night that became a story you still tell. That’s not sentiment. It’s one of the most robust findings in relationship psychology.

The self-expansion effect

Psychologists Arthur and Elaine Aron showed that people bond fastest during novel, mildly challenging activities. The mechanism is called self-expansion: new experiences light up our reward systems, and we attribute part of that glow to the people beside us. Same two strangers, two settings: a quiet coffee produces polite conversation; a blind tasting of six unlabelled wines produces laughter, wrong guesses, mock outrage - and a bond.

Memory does the compounding

Shared experiences also outperform conversation on retention. Episodic memory - memory for events - is stickier than memory for information. Six months from now you won’t remember what anyone said over coffee, but you’ll remember the rooftop when the sky turned violet and the DJ played exactly the right song. People who feature in our vivid memories feel closer to us. Experiences are how you get into someone’s highlight reel.

Stories are social glue

Every shared experience mints a story, and stories are what groups run on. ‘Remember the sommelier who asked the wrong questions on purpose?’ is an inside joke, a reunion trigger, and an identity marker all at once. This is why SPARK builds evenings around formats - dinners with a twist, tastings, culture crawls - rather than open-ended mingles. A format guarantees the story.

Choose experiences over catch-ups

When you want a relationship to deepen, stop proposing coffee and start proposing events. Something neither of you has done. Something with a beginning, a middle and a punchline. In a city like Bangkok there’s no excuse - tonight’s options are already curated. Talking maintains relationships. Doing builds them.

Suggested reading: The Science Behind Meaningful Relationships and Why Real-Life Connections Matter More Than Ever.