Can asking each other 36 questions and staring into each other’s eyes for four minutes make two people fall in love?
Alice Mongkonglite / BuzzFeed
A few weeks ago, Mandy Len Catron of the New York Times published "To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This," which has since gone viral and even inspired a few parodies. In the piece, Catron talks about going to a bar with a man who would later become her boyfriend and asking each other 36 questions, followed by four minutes of uninterrupted eye contact. The study, formed by Dr. Arthur Aron of Stony Brook University, was originally designed to measure closeness in strangers, but has since then been used to try to form romantic bonds between people.
"We were trying to find a method in the laboratory to create closeness," Aron told BuzzFeed. "There had been a fair amount of research on how people tend to form friendships, and what that research showed was that a very standard process is that they self-disclose, reveal personal things about themselves at a gradually increasing rate, and that it's reciprocal. So we wanted to see if we could make that happen in a short amount of time in a lab."
What matters even more than self-disclosure, Aron said, is how the other person responds. "If I'm sitting there self-disclosing and the other person is just sitting there blankly and then takes their turn, it's not going to have the same effect, we think, based on the research, than if the other person is nodding and appreciating that that's how you feel."
"Believing that someone is interested in deeply knowing you and seeing you for your true self is an extremely important ingredient for intimacy to develop," Dr. Jill P. Weber told BuzzFeed. "But more powerful than believing this about a person is actually experiencing someone asking questions and displaying interest in a person's most intimate details."
As far as the eye contact's effect, Dr. Kelly Campbell of California State University told BuzzFeed that "researchers have found that the 'bonding' or 'love' hormone of oxytocin gets released during prolonged eye contact. This is the same hormone that gets released when mothers breastfeed and gaze into the eyes of their infant."
Some of us were meeting strangers for the first time on a blind date. Some of us had just started seeing the person or were in new relationships. Others were together for a decade or so.
The official study had the 36 questions divided into three sets, where each section was timed for 15 minutes and the whole experiment lasted for 45 minutes total. However, we decided to answer all 36 questions the same way that Catron did in her piece, our experiences ranging from three and a half to seven hours, respectively.
Alice Mongkonglite / BuzzFeed
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