How To Fall In Love In 4 Minutes!

Two strangers. Four minutes. Thirty-six questions. My first-hand account of romance, the scientific way.

- Mandy Len Cartron

About 20 years ago, the psychologist Arthur Aron succeeded in making two strangers fall in love in his laboratory. Two summers ago, 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 and I were hanging out for the first time one-on-one. He was a university acquaintance I occasionally ran into at the climbing gym and had thought, What if? We were nursing our first beers when our conversation took an unexpectedly personal turn, and he said, “I suspect, given a few commonalities, you could fall in love with anyone. If so, how do you choose someone?”

“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 explained the study to my friend. A man and a woman enter the lab through separate doors. They sit face-to-face and ask each other 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, the two participants were married.

“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 were 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?”