Do you want him to fall in love with you, and fast?

Can two people fall in love over 36 questions and 4 silent minutes of eye contact? That is the experiment run by the psychologist Arthur Aron, made famous by a viral piece in the New York Times: three sets of questions, each more intimate than the last, followed by a long look — a protocol meant to speed up emotional closeness between two strangers.

Dr Aron’s experiment: from the lab to the bar

Dr Aron’s idea is that answering a personality questionnaire, with a game of held looks alongside it, can bring two people to fall in love with each other. The first experiment, run in 1997, brought two heterosexual strangers of opposite sexes into a laboratory through two different doors. Sitting face to face, they took turns answering a form of 36 questions, then looked into each other’s eyes for 4 minutes without speaking.

Among the volunteers, one couple married six months later. The experiment went worldwide when Mandy Len Catron, a professor at the University of Vancouver, wrote about it in the New York Times under the title “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This”. She described sitting down in a bar with a single man she already knew and trying the protocol with him: they laughed and cried together, then looked at each other for four minutes without a word. They fell in love.

Intimacy at the heart of falling in love

Mandy Len Catron explains that Dr Aron’s research aims at creating “interpersonal closeness”. Several studies have looked at how we fold other people into the sense we have of ourselves. Across the 36 questions, the confidences grow more intense, and so does the attention paid to the other person’s good qualities. Catron puts it simply: “it really is lovely to hear what someone else likes about you.”

She goes on: “we all have a particular way of presenting ourselves to the world […]. Dr Aron’s questions make that impossible, because they work as a kind of accelerator of intimacy.” What his approach teaches, she says, is that trust and intimacy can be built, and built fairly simply — and both are essential if love is to flourish.

What actually happens, biologically?

When two people share a degree of intimacy, their brains release oxytocin, a hormone that switches on with passionate love and carries the feeling of attachment. Sharing an intimate moment, through words or through a held look, is thought to help love take root and last. Still, nobody falls in love by accident: the process assumes a certain readiness, wanted and conscious.

The method is not foolproof. Never force intimacy on someone who does not want to get close so quickly, and it works no miracles if the relationship fails to hold, over time, the same emotional commitment as that first meeting. Those reservations aside, the experiment has proved itself and still holds twenty years after publication. Nothing stops an established couple from trying it, to find again the moment when two people really look at each other.

The 36 questions, set by set

Set one

1. If you could invite any one person in the world to dinner, who would you choose?
2. Would you like to be famous? Famous for what, exactly?
3. Do you ever rehearse what you are going to say before making a phone call? Why?
4. What would a perfect day look like for you?
5. When did you last sing? And for someone else?
6. If you could live to 90 and keep, from the age of 30 on, either your physical health or your mental health for the 60 years that followed, which would you keep?
7. Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?
8. Name three things you seem to have in common with the person across from you.
9. What are you most grateful for in your life?
10. If you could change one thing about the way you were brought up, what would it be?
11. Take four minutes and tell your life story in as much detail as you can.
12. If you woke up tomorrow with one new skill or one new quality, what would it be?

Set two

1. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life or your future, what would you want to know?
2. Is there something you have dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?
3. What is the greatest achievement of your life?
4. In friendship, what matters most to you?
5. What is your most treasured memory?
6. What is your worst memory?
7. If you learned you had only one year left to live, what would you change about the way you live now? Why?
8. What does the word friendship mean to you?
9. What part do love and affection play in your life?
10. Take turns naming something you find positive in the other person — five in all.
11. How close and warm is your family? Was your childhood happier than most people’s?
12. How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?

Set three

1. Each of you, say three true things about the two of you (for example: “The two of us in this room, we both feel…”).
2. Finish this sentence: “I wish I had someone to share…”
3. If you were to become close friends with the person across from you, tell them what they would need to know.
4. Tell the person across from you what you like about them, very honestly.
5. Tell the person across from you about an embarrassing moment in your life.
6. When did you last cry in front of someone? And on your own?
7. Tell the person across from you something you already like about them.
8. What is the one thing that can never be joked about?
9. If you were to die tonight with no chance to speak to anyone, what would you most regret not having said? Why haven’t you said it yet?
10. Your house catches fire. You save every member of your family, but you can carry out only one more thing. What is it, and why?
11. Of everyone in your family, whose loss would affect you most? Why?
12. Share a personal problem and ask the other person how they would handle it, what they would do in your place, and how they think you feel about it.

Some questions are light and easy, others go deep. All that is left is to look into each other’s eyes for four minutes, and close an encounter full of feeling.