How to Fall in Love with Anyone

by Mandy Len Catron

  Then I thought of that old Arthur Aron study, filed away in my brain. The study had come up before in conversations with other men—dates and friends. But I always stopped short of admitting to wanting to try it. I guess I was waiting for the right moment.

  “Actually,” I said to Mark, “psychologists have tried making people fall in love. With interesting results.” I described what I remembered of the methodology. I told him how I’d read that two of the participants were married six months later. And then, realizing this was that moment, I added: “I’ve always wanted to try it.”

  “Let’s do it,” he said, not skipping a beat. And so we did.

  If I had known this was how our night would go—or if I’d allowed myself to have any specific romantic expectations—I might’ve been scared. But the evening had its own momentum, and it was easier to surrender to that momentum than to think about the implications of what we were doing.

  Dr. Arthur Aron’s thirty-six questions for generating interpersonal closeness are ultimately about knowledge: about getting to know someone quickly, about being known. When he published the questions in 1997, his intent was not to make people fall in love, but rather to help them create “sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personal self-disclosure.” The questionnaire has been used to facilitate relationships between police and community members, and to decrease prejudice across ethnic groups.3 I don’t know if the ones we used are the same questions he employed in the original, unpublished study, but they were the easiest to find online.

  Let me pause here to acknowledge a couple of ways in which our experience already fails to line up with the study. First of all, we were not in a lab. We were in a bar on a Tuesday night, drinking strong beers without food. Secondly—and importantly—we were not strangers. And not only were we not strangers, I see now that one neither suggests nor agrees to try an experiment designed to make people fall in love if they aren’t a little bit open to this actually happening.

  We spent the next couple of hours passing my iPhone back and forth, each taking a turn posing a question to the other before answering it ourselves.

  The list begins fairly innocuously. Like question two: “Would you like to be famous? And in what way?” And question five: “When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?” But the questions become more revealing quickly. I’ve done a little more research since that night and discovered that Aron and his colleagues believe the increasingly personal order of the questions is essential to the study’s outcome.

  The questions reminded me of the infamous frog-in-boiling-water 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, accelerating a process that can typically take weeks or months.

  Some of the questions were really interesting, like question seven: “Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?” (I did have a hunch, as it turns out—breast cancer—but I had no idea until I answered the question; I credit my mother for this, thanks to her periodic emails on the value of regular self-examinations.) I liked discovering things about myself, even when they were morbid things. I liked learning about Mark even more. I liked how attentively he listened. I wondered if this attention was the inevitable product of the scenario, or if it was him.

  The real value of the questions is not in their specific content, but rather that they give you a mechanism for getting to know someone. You get to ask what you might otherwise be scared to ask. You get to confess the things you might not be brave enough to confess.

  The prompt “Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common” came early on (number eight). He said, “I think we’re both interested in each other.” I grinned, surprised, took a big gulp of beer, and nodded as he continued.

  To question thirteen, “If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future, or anything else, what would you want to know?” I said I wanted to know if I would ever get married and have children. I didn’t say that this question sometimes kept me up at night, that I had been, for years, deeply and secretly concerned that this was the one club—that of happily married parents—I would not be invited to join. Even admitting my desire to know felt like exposing the worst truth about myself, which was that some part of me worried that I just wasn’t the kind of woman men wanted to marry.

  When he said, “Yeah, I think I’d ask the crystal ball the same thing,” I was surprised. But I felt sure that his desire was born of curiosity, not desperation. He didn’t seem like the kind of person who worried about his own deservingness.

  The bar, which was empty when we arrived, had filled up by the time we paused for a bathroom break. I sat alone at the table, aware of my surroundings for the first time in at least an hour and wondered if anyone had been listening to our conversation. If they had—if anyone had even been sitting close enough to hear or care—I’d not noticed. I didn’t notice as the crowd thinned again and the evening grew late.

  We all have a narrative of ourselves that we offer up to strangers and acquaintances, but Aron’s questions make it nearly impossible to rely on that narrative. The accelerated intimacy the questions offered was the kind I remembered from sleepaway camp, when a friend and I stayed up all night exchanging the stories of our lives. At thirteen, 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 opportunities.

  The questions that ask you to compliment your partner struck me as some of the most important—and also the most uncomfortable to answer. Question twenty-two, for example, asks that you “alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner, a total of five items.” Telling Mark what I liked about him—the way he talked when he was excited, the way his friends all seemed to admire him—felt like showing my cards too soon. But hearing what he liked about me was thrilling.

  “You have nice legs,” he said. The subtext had seemingly evaporated.

  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 taste in beer, how you dress, how pleased you are when you hear a good pun” makes one person’s traits or preferences 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.

  • • •

  The last question, number thirty-six, was different from most of the others: “Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how he or she might handle it.” The only problem I could think of was my relationship with Tom. I hesitated.

  “So I’ve been dating this guy,” I said, “and I can’t really tell if it’s going anywhere.” Subtext: You should know I’m dating someone.

  He laughed: “I can’t believe you’re asking me for dating advice.” Subtext: I thought this was a date.

  I don’t recall what advice Mark gave, but I remember searching his face for signs of interest or disappointment as he spoke. It seemed the questions made it possible to talk about almost anything.

  Looking around the bar when we were done, I felt as if I’d just woken up. I didn’t want the conversation to end. But without the questions to guide us, I suddenly felt self-conscious.

  “That wasn’t so bad,” I said. “Definitely less uncomfortable than the staring-into-each-other’s-eyes part would be.”

  “Do you think we should do that, too?” he asked.

  “Here?” I looked around the bar. It seemed too weird, too public.

  “We could stand on the bridge,” he suggested, gesturing out the door.

  The night was warmish and I was wide-awake. I could feel my rib cage tighte
n as we walked to the apex of the Granville Street Bridge and glanced down at the inlet below us. Mark seemed calm. It was late, past midnight. A few cars buzzed by, but there were no other pedestrians. The glassy facades of downtown Vancouver towered behind me as I set a timer for four minutes and slid my phone into my pocket.

  “Okay,” I said, inhaling deeply.

  “Okay,” he said, smiling.

  In general, I think about eye contact more than I would like to. I think about it when I teach and whenever I have a conversation with someone I’ve just met. Thinking about eye contact is the domain of the self-conscious, of awkward daters and middle-schoolers who have never kissed anyone. Maybe it is also the domain of people who prefer that subtext remain subtext.

  For the first minute or two of staring Mark in the eye, I had to remind myself to breathe regularly. And I don’t mean that in a flustered-yet-romantic way. I mean I was so uncomfortable that my lungs seized up as if I’d taken a deep dive into cold water. We kept smiling, awkwardly. Or maybe only I was awkward. Mark made it seem as though he had a habit of staring people right in the eye for sustained periods of time.

  I know the eyes are supposedly the windows to the soul, but the real crux of this moment, should you ever find yourself trying it, is not simply that you are seeing someone, but that you are seeing someone seeing you.

  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—the four minutes had passed so quickly—and a little relieved. But there was also a sense of loss. Already I was beginning to see our evening through the surreal and unreliable lens of retrospect.

  Unsure what else to do next, we walked, me pushing my bike, in the direction of his house. I remember trying to make light conversation and finding it difficult, perhaps because it feels disingenuous to chat about the weather after having just confessed the one thing you would most like to share with someone before you die.

  It was late, but I wasn’t sleepy. I know we stood in his yard chatting, but I don’t remember a single thing we talked about. I only remember not wanting to leave. At one point he invited me in, but I said no, I really was going to bike home soon. There was a long hug. I probably mentioned, rather effusively, what a good night I’d had.

  I waited a beat for him to kiss me, and he did.

  A more romantic story would end here. But as we stood in his yard kissing I got so dizzy (from the kissing and probably also the beer and the lack of dinner) that I had to pull away and go sit on a plastic patio chair. I wanted to be like Julie Delpy in Before Sunrise, lying in the grass at the end of the night and saying, very coolly, “Do you know what I want? To be kissed.” Instead I sat with my head in my palms, waiting for the world to settle.

  “Are you okay?” Mark asked.

  I laughed. “Yes. I just need a minute.” I stood up and kissed him again. Then I got on my bike, buzzing, not wanting to think about much, just to feel the summer air at two in the morning.

  • • •

  After that first night, I knew that Mark and I would be close. I didn’t know what our relationship would look like or what, if anything, the experience meant. I didn’t know what I wanted from Mark.

  He texted the next morning to say what a good time he’d had. And for a few days, we left it at that.

  The next weekend, I joined a group of his friends on a brewery tour. We biked between the city’s microbreweries, stopping by parks for Frisbee or bocce. And as the day went on, I noticed myself watching him when he wasn’t looking, wanting to know what it would be like to kiss him again. But there were too many people around for us to get a moment alone.

  At the end of the night, our friend Evan pulled me aside. “So: you and Mark,” he said, knowingly.

  “What did he tell you?” I asked, feeling like a teenager.

  “He said you had a boyfriend,” Evan said.

  “I thought he had a girlfriend,” I said.

  “Yeah.” Evan laughed. “I’m not sure what’s going on with that.”

  The next day I asked Mark to meet up. After some awkward preamble, I finally got around to it: the questions, the staring, the kissing—was it a date?

  “Yeah,” he said casually.

  “So, are we dating?” I asked.

  “I think we are,” he said.

  What about the girlfriend? They were broken up, he told me. They would probably stay that way. Probably.

  I kept dating Tom. I told him I was seeing someone else. He said he was, too. He said it felt good finally talking openly about these things and I agreed. We ate ice cream with tiny spoons. It was the hottest stretch of summer, when everything feels light and inconsequential, though I knew, in some distant corner of my brain, that it wasn’t.

  • • •

  I was home for my sister Casey’s wedding when Mark posted a photo of his ex-girlfriend on Instagram. They were riding bikes. In Portland. My stomach turned.

  It was Labor Day weekend and the thunderstorms that rolled through northern Virginia every afternoon were worrying the bride.

  I showed Casey the photo. “They’re just riding bikes,” she said. “It could be friendly.”

  “In another city?” I asked. “On a long weekend?”

  “Don’t you have two boyfriends?” she teased. I could feel every one of the three thousand miles between Vancouver and Virginia. From such a distance, my romantic life looked precarious, at best.

  Casey had chosen a dress with an elaborately beaded bodice and an enormous gray tulle skirt. Since she wanted neutral colors, this meant her bridesmaids would wear white. I joked that having a strapless, floor-length white gown in my closet would make my Vegas elopement with one of my boyfriends that much easier one day.

  When aunts and uncles asked why I didn’t bring a date, I explained that I was seeing two guys in Vancouver and I couldn’t choose between them. We all laughed.

  In fact, I’d invited two friends to come to the wedding with me, to keep me sane and share my huge, beautiful room in the vineyard farmhouse. But both already had other plans. I was okay with going alone until I started writing my speech. I felt petrified every time I imagined the gaze of all these people I’d known since childhood watching me articulate my deepest joys. I was so happy for Casey, I could hardly stand it. I was afraid I would burst into ugly tears halfway through the speech. I longed for someone (anyone, really, though I think at that moment, I would’ve chosen Tom if I could have) to be there just for me, to keep me in that safe space between sober and tipsy, joyful and hysterical. But I was on my own.

  As it happened, dark clouds drifted in just before the ceremony, and Casey was the one who burst into tears at the sight of her guests running through the rain to take cover under the nearest tree. But the storm passed quickly and the ceremony went as planned. I stood in my white dress sweating in the humidity and I cried my happy bridesmaid heart out. And then I gave my speech, without any more tears. And, for a day, I didn’t care at all about my strange life in Vancouver.

  After the reception, I snuck up to my room while the bride and groom and their friends lit a bonfire. I turned on the ceiling fan, opened the window, and peeled off my dress. I flipped through the channels until I found a movie, Moulin Rouge, and I climbed into the sprawling king-size bed. In the morning, I would drive three hours to an airport, where I’d board the first of a series of planes before arriving in Vancouver at midnight. The
morning after that, I would teach the first classes of a new semester. Labor Day had passed and now fall would come and, with it, the regular, responsible life I’d left behind in May. A life that did not include standing on bridges in the middle of the night.

  I saw Tom once more after my sister’s wedding. We cooked pork chops and danced to Otis Redding in his kitchen. He said he missed me, that it felt like I’d been gone for weeks. He told me it was weird for him, dating more than one person. I said I knew what he meant. I felt like things were really changing between us—there was a new openness there. It felt good.

  A few days later, he told me he’d decided to date only one person, and he did not choose me.

  I tried not to think about this—about what it meant to be the one not chosen. And for the most part, I did a good job. I busied myself with writing projects.

  I invited Mark over for dinner the next week. I made sausage and grits and told him about the wedding and about everything I did and did not miss about Virginia. I told him about Tom, and how I was feeling a little heartbroken. He said he didn’t know what was going on with his ex and I didn’t ask him to clarify.

  He was still struggling with that same question: How do you choose?

  “Maybe,” I said, “you have to find someone whose face you don’t get tired of looking at. You know, a face that won’t suddenly look like a stranger’s one day. That happened to me once.”

  I told him about my sister, who, despite tearing up almost every time she looked at the forecast in the week leading up to her wedding, never once expressed any doubt about the man she was planning to marry: “I don’t know how you get to that point.”

  “I don’t either,” he said.

  We ended the night with a friendly hug. That week I started writing the essay about trying Aron’s study, the piece I would later publish in the New York Times.4

  • • •

  As I originally conceived it, the essay was not about falling in love. I thought Mark and I had had a really great night, but I didn’t think of it as a life-defining experience. I wasn’t in love when I wrote the first draft. I was in the midst of low-grade heartache, which seemed like a good place for clearheaded writing about love. I wanted to point out some of the assumptions we make about love, and explain how trying Aron’s study helped me rethink some things. In the end, this was what the essay was about. But it was also about something more.