The 36 Questions That Lead to Love
By Daniel Jones
Jan. 9, 2015
In
Mandy Len Catron’s Modern Love essay, “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do
This,” [below the list] she refers to a study by the psychologist
Arthur Aron (and others) that explores whether intimacy between two
strangers can be accelerated by having them ask each other a specific
series of personal questions. The 36 questions in the study are broken
up into three sets, with each set intended to be more probing than the
previous one.
The idea is that mutual vulnerability fosters
closeness. To quote the study’s authors, “One key pattern associated
with the development of a close relationship among peers is sustained,
escalating, reciprocal, personal self-disclosure.” Allowing oneself to
be vulnerable with another person can be exceedingly difficult, so this
exercise forces the issue.
The final task Ms. Catron and her
friend try — staring into each other’s eyes for four minutes — is less
well documented, with the suggested duration ranging from two minutes
to four. But Ms. Catron was unequivocal in her recommendation. “Two
minutes is just enough to be terrified,” she told me. “Four really goes
somewhere.”
Set I
1. Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a
dinner guest?
2. Would you like to be famous? In what way?
3. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are
going to say? Why?
4. What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?
5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?
6.
If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or
body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would
you want?
7. Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?
8. Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common.
9. For what in your life do you feel most grateful?
10. If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what
would it be?
11. Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much
detail as possible.
12. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or
ability, what would it be?
Set II
13.
If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life,
the future or anything else, what would you want to know?
14. Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time?
Why haven’t you done it?
15. What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?
16. What do you value most in a friendship?
17. What is your most treasured memory?
18. What is your most terrible memory?
19. If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you
change anything about the way you are now living? Why?
20. What does friendship mean to you?
21. What roles do love and affection play in your life?
22. Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic
of your partner. Share a total of five items.in story
23. How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was
happier than most other people’s?
24. How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?
Set III
25. Make three true “we” statements each. For instance, “We are both in
this room feeling ... “
26. Complete this sentence: “I wish I had someone with whom I could
share ... “
27. If you were going to become a close friend with your partner,
please share what would be important for him or her to know.
28.
Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time,
saying things that you might not say to someone you’ve just met.
29. Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life.
30. When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?
31. Tell your partner something that you like about them already.
32. What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?
33.
If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with
anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t
you told them yet?
34. Your house, containing everything you
own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time
to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why?
35. Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most
disturbing? Why?
36.
Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how he or she
might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you
seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.
==============
To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do
This
By Mandy Len Catron
Jan. 9, 2015
More
than 20 years ago, the psychologist Arthur Aron succeeded in making two
strangers fall in love in his laboratory. Last summer, I applied his
technique in my own life, which is how I found myself standing on a
bridge at midnight, staring into a man’s eyes for exactly four minutes.
Let
me explain. Earlier in the evening, that man had said: “I suspect,
given a few commonalities, you could fall in love with anyone. If so,
how do you choose someone?”
He was a university acquaintance I
occasionally ran into at the climbing gym and had thought, “What if?” I
had gotten a glimpse into his days on Instagram. But this was the first
time we had hung out one-on-one.
“Actually, psychologists have
tried making people fall in love,” I said, remembering Dr. Aron’s
study. “It’s fascinating. I’ve always wanted to try it.”
I first
read about the study when I was in the midst of a breakup. Each time I
thought of leaving, my heart overruled my brain. I felt stuck. So, like
a good academic, I turned to science, hoping there was a way to love
smarter.
I explained the study to my university acquaintance. A
heterosexual man and woman enter the lab through separate doors. They
sit face to face and answer a series of increasingly personal
questions. Then they stare silently into each other’s eyes for four
minutes. The most tantalizing detail: Six months later, two
participants were married. They invited the entire lab to the ceremony.
“Let’s try it,” he said.
Let
me acknowledge the ways our experiment already fails to line up with
the study. First, we were in a bar, not a lab. Second, we weren’t
strangers. Not only that, but I see now that one neither suggests nor
agrees to try an experiment designed to create romantic love if one
isn’t open to this happening.
I Googled Dr. Aron’s questions;
there are 36. We spent the next two hours passing my iPhone across the
table, alternately posing each question.
They began innocuously: “Would you like to be famous? In what way?” And
“When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?”
But they quickly became probing.
In
response to the prompt, “Name three things you and your partner appear
to have in common,” he looked at me and said, “I think we’re both
interested in each other.”
I grinned and gulped my beer as he
listed two more commonalities I then promptly forgot. We exchanged
stories about the last time we each cried, and confessed the one thing
we’d like to ask a fortuneteller. We explained our relationships with
our mothers.
The questions reminded me of the infamous boiling
frog experiment in which the frog doesn’t feel the water getting hotter
until it’s too late. With us, because the level of vulnerability
increased gradually, I didn’t notice we had entered intimate territory
until we were already there, a process that can typically take weeks or
months.
I liked learning about myself through my answers, but I
liked learning things about him even more. The bar, which was empty
when we arrived, had filled up by the time we paused for a bathroom
break.
I sat alone at our table, aware of my surroundings for
the first time in an hour, and wondered if anyone had been listening to
our conversation. If they had, I hadn’t noticed. And I didn’t notice as
the crowd thinned and the night got late.
We all have a
narrative of ourselves that we offer up to strangers and acquaintances,
but Dr. Aron’s questions make it impossible to rely on that narrative.
Ours was the kind of accelerated intimacy I remembered from summer
camp, staying up all night with a new friend, exchanging the details of
our short lives. At 13, away from home for the first time, it felt
natural to get to know someone quickly. But rarely does adult life
present us with such circumstances.
The moments I found most
uncomfortable were not when I had to make confessions about myself, but
had to venture opinions about my partner. For example: “Alternate
sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your
partner, a total of five items” (Question 22), and “Tell your partner
what you like about them; be very honest this time saying things you
might not say to someone you’ve just met” (Question 28).
Much of
Dr. Aron’s research focuses on creating interpersonal closeness. In
particular, several studies investigate the ways we incorporate others
into our sense of self. It’s easy to see how the questions encourage
what they call “self-expansion.” Saying things like, “I like your
voice, your taste in beer, the way all your friends seem to admire
you,” makes certain positive qualities belonging to one person
explicitly valuable to the other.
It’s astounding, really, to
hear what someone admires in you. I don’t know why we don’t go around
thoughtfully complimenting one another all the time.
We finished
at midnight, taking far longer than the 90 minutes for the original
study. Looking around the bar, I felt as if I had just woken up. “That
wasn’t so bad,” I said. “Definitely less uncomfortable than the staring
into each other’s eyes part would be.”
He hesitated and asked. “Do you think we should do that, too?”
“Here?” I looked around the bar. It seemed too weird, too public.
“We could stand on the bridge,” he said, turning toward the window.
The
night was warm and I was wide-awake. We walked to the highest point,
then turned to face each other. I fumbled with my phone as I set the
timer.
“O.K.,” I said, inhaling sharply.
“O.K.,” he said, smiling.
I’ve
skied steep slopes and hung from a rock face by a short length of rope,
but staring into someone’s eyes for four silent minutes was one of the
more thrilling and terrifying experiences of my life. I spent the first
couple of minutes just trying to breathe properly. There was a lot of
nervous smiling until, eventually, we settled in.
I know the
eyes are the windows to the soul or whatever, but the real crux of the
moment was not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was
seeing someone really seeing me. Once I embraced the terror of this
realization and gave it time to subside, I arrived somewhere unexpected.
I
felt brave, and in a state of wonder. Part of that wonder was at my own
vulnerability and part was the weird kind of wonder you get from saying
a word over and over until it loses its meaning and becomes what it
actually is: an assemblage of sounds.
So it was with the eye,
which is not a window to anything but rather a clump of very useful
cells. The sentiment associated with the eye fell away and I was struck
by its astounding biological reality: the spherical nature of the
eyeball, the visible musculature of the iris and the smooth wet glass
of the cornea. It was strange and exquisite.
When the timer
buzzed, I was surprised — and a little relieved. But I also felt a
sense of loss. Already I was beginning to see our evening through the
surreal and unreliable lens of retrospect.
Most of us think about love as something that happens to us. We fall.
We get crushed.
But
what I like about this study is how it assumes that love is an action.
It assumes that what matters to my partner matters to me because we
have at least three things in common, because we have close
relationships with our mothers, and because he let me look at him.
I
wondered what would come of our interaction. If nothing else, I thought
it would make a good story. But I see now that the story isn’t about
us; it’s about what it means to bother to know someone, which is really
a story about what it means to be known.
It’s true you can’t
choose who loves you, although I’ve spent years hoping otherwise, and
you can’t create romantic feelings based on convenience alone. Science
tells us biology matters; our pheromones and hormones do a lot of work
behind the scenes.
But despite all this, I’ve begun to think
love is a more pliable thing than we make it out to be. Arthur Aron’s
study taught me that it’s possible — simple, even — to generate trust
and intimacy, the feelings love needs to thrive.
You’re probably
wondering if he and I fell in love. Well, we did. Although it’s hard to
credit the study entirely (it may have happened anyway), the study did
give us a way into a relationship that feels deliberate. We spent weeks
in the intimate space we created that night, waiting to see what it
could become.
Love didn’t happen to us. We’re in love because we each made the choice
to be.
|
5.
Weddings often begin with the Minister entering
from
the side. After any attendents are in place, the Partners may enter from the door of the Chapel or from the side room. Alternatively, couples may make plans
best suited to the facility and the couple’s wishes.
Dr Vern Barnet, ordained in 1970, founded
