To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This

To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This
By Ms. Catron - First appeared in NYT on Jan 9th, 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.

Dr. Arthur Aron's 36 Questions To Bring Lovers [and Strangers] Closer

36 Questions to Bring You Closer Together
Published on October 15, 2013 by Temma Ehrenfeld for Psychology Today based on Dr. Aron's findings in his Interpersonal Closeness Study.

[Editor's note: If you're looking to fast track a relationship or you just want to make sure the person you're dating is right for you before investing any more time, then this is one possible way to go about it. Treat it light-heartedly and with fun and it will be easy. I reccommend breaking this up into two dates so it can remain light hearted and fun.] 

Get to know someone and create a sense of intimacy, in just 90 minutes.

These questions only take about 90 minutes to discuss—and they almost always make two people feel better about each other and want to see each other again, according to social psychology researcher Dr. Arthur Aron of the Interpersonal Relationships Lab at Stony Brook University in New York, who published his results in "The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness" in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (1997).

You can try these questions with a date, but they're not necessarily only applicable to fostering romance. You can also try them with people you already know well—friends, family members, even long-term partners—to deepen your ties.

Here are the instructions and questions from the original study:

What Brain Scans Teach Us About Intense Long-term Passionate Love

Published on February 3, 2011 by Adoree Durayappah-Harrison, MAPP in Thriving101

What's The Secret to Staying Madly in Love?

Is it even possible to feel madly in love with someone after five, ten, twenty years together?

Due to recent neurological research, we are a bit closer to answering these perplexing questions and demystifying the secrets behind achieving intense, lasting, romantic love.

A recent study published online in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, investigated, for the first time, which brain regions are associated with long-term romantic love.

Researchers compared the brain scans of long-term married individuals to the scans of individuals who have recently fallen in love. Surprisingly, the results revealed similar activity in specific brain regions for both long-term, intense romantic love and couples in early-stage romantic love. These particular brain regions could be the clue to why certain couples stay madly in love years, even decades, later

A group of researchers, led by Drs. Bianca Acevedo and Arthur Aron of the Department of Psychology at Stony Brook University, used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of happily married individuals (10 women and 7 men) reporting intense romantic love for their partner after an average of 21 years of marriage.

The Characteristics of Intense Romantic Love

Intense romantic love typifies symptoms (common to being newly in love) including:

• Craving for union
• Focused attention
• Increased energy with the partner
• Motivation to do things that make the partner happy
• Sexual attraction and thinking about the partner when apart

The objective of the study was to investigate how brain system activity in individuals in a long-term intense passionate love compared to the brain system activity of individuals newly in romantic love.