Aron's method was simple. Two strangers sit face to face and answer 36 increasingly personal questions, then stare silently into each other's eyes for four minutes. Catron's favorite detail from the study: “Six months later, two participants were married. They invited the entire lab to the ceremony.”
So Catron and her acquaintance spent two hours in a bar passing an iPhone across the table, taking turns with the questions. They start easy, “Would you like to be famous? In what way?”, and go deep fast. “We all have a narrative of ourselves that we offer up to strangers and acquaintances,” Catron wrote in her Modern Love essay about that night, “but Dr. Aron's questions make it impossible to rely on that narrative.” It reminded her of summer camp, staying up all night with a new friend.
The hardest questions weren't the confessions. They were the compliments, like question 28, where you tell your partner what you like about them, honestly. “It's astounding, really, to hear what someone admires in you,” she wrote. “I don't know why we don't go around thoughtfully complimenting one another all the time.”
They fell in love. Catron is careful not to credit the questions entirely; it may have happened anyway. But her conclusion is the reason this works as a neighborhood gathering and not just a date: “What I like about this study is how it assumes that love is an action.” Aron built the questions to create closeness between any two people. Couples, old friends, and strangers all walk away knowing each other differently. “Love didn't happen to us,” Catron wrote. “We're in love because we each made the choice to be.”
Sources
To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This — Mandy Len Catron, The New York Times, Modern Love, January 2015.
The 36 Questions That Lead to Love — The New York Times — the full question list.
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