Abigayle Konys Moreno

This piece was published in the Spring 2018 issue of Catalyst, a print-only science-based literary journal.

The story starts with Mandy Len Catron’s “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This.”[1] It contains the supposed 36 questions, followed by a session of staring into each other’s eyes for four straight minutes, advertised as having the power to make two people fall in love. Proposed by Dr. Arthur Aron and colleagues, the questions are broken up into three sets, each slightly more probing than the last. Apparently, it works. Or at least Catron’s experience supports her claim that it may. With something as equally elusive and desired as love, this kind of claim is usually enough to grab onto.

I’ve met any number of random humans in my lifetime, and I’m fairly confident that I wouldn’t and haven’t fallen in love with most of them after mere exposure to prying questions. I’m thinking of the teammates I’ve spent hours with traveling, training, and in various games, meets, and regattas. I’m thinking of tween sleepovers as a space for hushed discussions about boys and attraction, and of bonfires with nervously sipped beers, alternative music, and feelings introduced without any names quite yet. Beyond that, any attempts at trying to make someone fall in love with me haven’t been all that successful. That could, however, have more to do my lack of flirtatious prowess than it has todo with anything else. Perhaps I could have just been asking the wrong questions. To find out, I did some digging at the source.

It turns out that the work by Aron et al. does not actually boast the attractive power that Catron advertises. Rather, it measures a partner’s scores for “feeling close” to the other that mimic the“behaving close” that occurs in a long-term relationship.[2] They’re measuring how likely someone might include the other person indecisions and judgments; read: how often you catch yourself thinking of someone. The questions are designed to be intimate without being awkward; they promote “escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure, and intimacy-associated behaviors.”[3] Telling someone your thoughts on your own death is a lot easier after you’ve complimented the other person a bit and talked about your dream vacation. This didn’t mean telling the other person you loved them, let alone did it lead you to feel this way. It just meant that participants would be given the tools to bond through a deeper level of personal understanding.

The questions sets are described as a “closeness-generating procedure” that could potentially lead to love, but explicitly do not guarantee instant Disney Princess-style infatuation.[4] While the hypothesis of an increased feeling of “closeness” was achieved in the results of the study, I would like to bet that I would try to keep any person who now knows the honest truth about my relationship with my mother in fairly close grasp. In fact, in a seven-week follow-up of the 58 pairs that were tested, not a single pair had indicated that they had gone on to fall in love.[5][6] Aron et al. qualify this lightly in stating that all participants were debriefed on the experiment and its motives after their test session, so after-effects could not be controlled. Basically, it’s not their effects to claim. Still, if participants didn’t fall in love knowing the intentions of the experiment, then chances of the pursuit happening on its own seem even slimmer.

It also should be brought up that the subject pairings were not completely random. Rather, they were initially matched through a questionnaire of relationship values on a Likert scale rating and included statements such as, “Students should dress in conventional ways.”[7] All participants were recruited from the same psychology class, so if the general shared interest in this subject wouldn’t spark some sort of conversation between two people, then the initial questionnaire at least laid the groundwork of sifting through personality types and generally similar values. Basically, participants wouldn’t be finding themselves stuck answering increasingly intimate questions with someone that would generally make them want to pull their hair out. Even still, these participants did not find love.

While Catron’s essay isn’t as much about falling in love as her snappy title advertises, I can appreciate her commentary on being both in love and being human. She eloquently states, “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.”[8] As a human, I am interested in what another human may have to say about being human. After all, the innate quality of us as social beings is important to love. The real question could then be: what is love beyond being human, having a human experience, and establishing an exploration of these undertakings with another human being? I wanted to know if this had any sort of merit, and decided to try it out for myself.

I will disclose that I do have a significant other. His name is Alex, and he and I first broke the ice with the common interest of being on collegiate sailing teams. With this connection, we essentially passed Aron et al.’s initial questionnaire: to be a college sailor, you most always carry a “work hard, play hard” mindset with a taste for cheap alcohol and the tolerance for occasional absurdity.[9] Every college sailing team plays the same drinking games, with the same rules that differ from every other college party setting. For us, it was an instant attraction that kicked off our relationship with a You drink, I drink, Jack pact at a very stereotypical summer night party. Think: mismatching lawn chairs situated on a house’s second floor deck. It hopelessly needs a new coat of wood stain that it will most likely never receive. Music is pouring through a Bluetooth speaker, and there is cheap booze to go around. You’ve probably been somewhere similar to this before, and can fill in the rest.

We usually tell people that we met at that sailing party—that I was invited because I was a sailor living in Boston, and that he happened to be there at the house that night. He invited me to his team’s “chill hangout” that night, and I decided—after drinking a singular Natural Light beer as a sorry form of pregame—that I would actually show up. As you can imagine, I’m glad I did. We clicked, maybe in the way Catron is advertising the questions allow two people to do. We got lucky in our pseudo-chanced meeting, and spent the rest of the summer getting to know each other. Read: Falling in Love.

I visited Alex in Boston this weekend, and I proposed the idea to him: Let’s go through the 36 questions and see how potent they actually are. He’s a pretty open guy, but I was met with a harsh lack of enthusiasm. Alex thought it would be a bunch of crap and a waste of the limited weekend time we get to share. While I had to admit he might be right, the hopeless romantic in me still wanted to give it a try.

To convince him, I posed a question from the last session, the most intimate: “If you were to die tomorrow, what would you regret having not told someone. Why haven’t you told them yet?” After offering my answer, he opened up to participating. I will admit that I am glad to know his answer, and sure, maybe a full set of them would make us closer. Our relationship had grown quickly, so for us it may fill in some early gaps we may have missed. I was, however, still skeptical. I will also admit that in proposing we take the quiz, I was already in love with him, so we may have made the perfect test subjects.[10] As Aron et al. point out, however, their experiment wasn’t perfect either.

In their discussion, it is made clear that the study Aron et al. produced was not a true experiment nor was it intended to replace the way in which natural relationships progress. Rather, they present their results as a means of creating dialogue between scientific methods and the elusive act of falling in love with another human. They acknowledge that their sample was not random and that pairs did not control for equal values and personality traits; each was not equally compatible. They called out to the scientific community for replication studies in a more controlled setting, hoping their publication would spark future investigation in this emerging field.[11] That was back in 1997, and since then the discussion has gained traction with the latest technological advancements.

It turns out that the activity of brain regions may be predictive of future relationship outcomes. Xiaomeng Xu and colleagues did the dirty work on this one, conducting an fMRI study of twelve couples at early, intense love stages of relationships, and then subsequently 40 months later.[12] Their results provide evidence that the caudate tail, a part of the brain densely populated with dopamine receptors, may be related to long-term relationship satisfaction. Couples who showed activation in this region in the early stages of their relationship were more likely to stay together by 40months.[13] Basically, during the honeymoon period, these couples’ brains were signaling to the body the preference for each other with intense happiness hormones.  Additionally, of the twelve couples, the six who had remained in their relationship through the 40-month period reported similar patterns of activation in the medial orbito frontal cortex at the beginning of the experiment as at the end of the 40 months, while couples that had broken up did not show such patterns. Because this area is correlated with feelings of self-worth, as well as a suspension of critical judgment, activity here again is suggested to be the brain indicating its positive preferences biologically.[14] To put it gently, if at a fundamental level, you are meant to be in it for the long run with a significant other, your brain will tell you fairly early on.[15] There might be no need for the judgmental relative to tell it like it is: your brain may already be expressing what everyone at Thanksgiving dinner is already thinking.

While Alex and I did not have access to brain scans when we first met, we did decide to test our luck withAron et al.’s work and answer the questions over dinner. As a result, did we fall in love more deeply, or in some realization of the truest first time? It’s hard to say. The experience allowed me to fill in some gaps in our timelines, the years I had only heard mentions of gained added color and clarity and cobbled the path to where we met. We followed moments of digression, both in the Uber on the way to the restaurant and between sloppy bites of burgers.  Admittedly, we glossed over the last compliments in the final set because it’s something we do often regardless. Part of me waited to feel some sort of fall—a meta-physical catalytic transcendence with some sort of grandeur attached—but that may have also felt artificial and medicated, or potentially invasive. Most definitely, it would have felt weird.

The couple seated practically elbow-to-elbow with us at the restaurant appeared to be on their first date. They talked graduate school and exchanged new, strange roommate stories. They laughed too much and ordered generic plates off the menu: grilled chicken, salads. My competitiveness couldn’t help but compare our dinner to theirs; we were having more fun for sure, or at least weren’t afraid to order a second, third, fourth basket of complimentary bread. The question list was simply the activity for the night, our adult version of crayons at the table before the food came out. If anything, the questions were an island to circle back to as part of our tangential conversation of practiced give and take.

The four minutes of staring into each other’s eyes came later while intertwined and watching a spout of the Winter Olympics broadcast. We decided not to time it because as sailors, we have a keen idea of what a minute feels like after having experienced countless starting sequences. The minutes were a construction of our own devices, much like the activity seemed for the most part. I knew what Alex’s eyes looked like already: they curve gently to the edges encased in a multitude of oaky brown eyelashes. He has a scar below his left eyebrow, nestled under the rogue hairs of his brow where they meet the curve of his scull. I wish I could dig out the blackheads that speckle the tip of his nose, but the scab I left the last time I tried signaled that the activity was best left off limits. He stuck his tongue out at me to remind me we were still counting. Four minutes to remember these details and the time spent gathering them up in the first place.

Catron may have been onto something about us as humans. Though the questions may not ensure a life of happiness and well wishing, having a guide through any life task as treacherous as falling in love can help ensure the footing. She and her love interest chose to make the fall after Aron et al.’s test facilitated this heavy lifting. In recent work, Aron and colleagues have attributed falling in love to what they call “self-expansion,”the idea of including others in the self. They attribute the rush of falling in love to what they call a rapid inclusion of another person into the self-identity.[16] It worked for Catron, and this self-expansion may account for her human experience of being known: perhaps it wasn’t so much that she was being known, but rather that she felt this rapid shift her self-identity. It is also important that she picked her partner strategically; making this quest for closeness was a conscious effort peaked from initial interest and allowed her to make such a shift. For Catron and her partner, this expansion may have been the fall. As for my hypothesis: these questions are designed for two people to open up to each other in ways that foster this sense of sharing self with others, but also that it will only facilitate something greater—read: Love—if an initial compatibility is there. The questions won’t make you fall in love; facilitating connection will.  If it takes The New York Times for you and your partner to get there, maybe it just isn’t in the cards for you. 

[1] Catron, MandyLen. 2015. “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This.” The New York Times. The New York Times. January 9. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/fashion/modern-love-to-fall-in-love-with-anyone-do-this.html.

[2] Aron, Arthur, Edward Melinat, Elaine N. Aron, Robert Darrin Vallone, and Renee J. Bator. 1997. “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 23 (4):364. doi:10.1177/0146167297234003.

[3] Aron et al., “TheExperimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness,” 364.

[4] Ibid., 364.

[5] Ibid., 371.

[6] Aron et al. discuss that in their third study, 57% of the pairs struck up a subsequent conversation, 35% had done something together outside of class (A date, perhaps?), and 37% now sat together in their psychology class; see Ibid., 371. The authors stress that their methods only tested for closeness immediately following a pair’s interaction.  Any residual closeness, as described here, was a bonus for them and the participants.

[7] Aron et al., “TheExperimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness,” 365.

[8] Catron, “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This.”

[9] For some, this reads: debauchery.

[10] This is something on which I will comment if asked, but that feels weird talking about at twenty-one years old: what does it mean exactly? I have a definition for myself, but I believe it can mean different things for different people. Perhaps this is why Aron et al. entered this research field with such small claims.

[11] Aron et al., “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness,” 373.

[12] Xu, Xiaomeng, Lucy Brown, Arthur Aron, Guikang Cao, Tingyong Feng, Bianca Acevedo, and Xuchu Weng. 2012.“Regional brain activity during early-Stage intense romantic love predicted relationship outcomes after 40 months: An fMRI assessment.” NeuroscienceLetters 526 (1): 34. doi:10.1016/j.neulet.2012.08.004.

[13] Xu et al., “Regional brain activity during early-Stage intense romantic love predicted relationship outcomes after 40 months,” 36.

[14] Ibid., 36.

[15] While these are still early findings in an emerging field of the neurological methods of measuring love, they measure couples that have already found each other.  Unfortunately, we don’t have a fairy godmother of scientific methods to take us to the ball quite yet.

[16] Aron, Arthur, andElaine N. Aron. 2015. “An Inspiration for Expanding the Self-Expansion Model of Love.” Emotion Review 8 (2): 112. doi:10.1177/1754073915594435.