The 36 Questions To Fall In Love: The Research Behind The Viral Experiment

Can asking each other a structured set of questions really help two people fall in love?

That's the premise behind the famous "36 questions that lead to love," an experiment popularized by a viral essay and inspired by real psychological research on how intimacy forms.

Today, people are bringing the quiz with them on first dates, and marriage therapists assign the activity to couples looking to emotionally reconnect.

The so-called 36 questions to fall in love are a set of questions developed in the 1990s by psychologists Arthur Aron, Ph.D., Elaine Aron, Ph.D., and other researchers to see if two strangers can develop an intimate connection just from asking each other a series of increasingly personal questions.

The 36 questions have helped at least some couples fall in love, though others haven't had as much luck using them.

Catron, the writer behind the viral Times essay, went on to marry the man she did the experiment with.

Another pair from one of the Arons' original experiments with the question set also got married, and the entire research team attended the wedding.

"I wish I had statistics on couples that have resulted from it, but I know of at least a few where the people contacted me directly," Daniel Jones, editor of the Modern Love column at the Times, said in a 2016 WBUR podcast episode about the essay.

The 36 questions were developed by a team of researchers led by Arthur Aron, Ph.D., and Elaine Aron, Ph.D., two psychologists (husband and wife) who have spent decades researching how attraction, intimacy, and romantic love form.

In 1997, the team published a paper in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin1 describing a series of experiments in which they asked pairs of strangers (or, in one version of the experiment, pairs of college classmates) to take turns asking each other each of the 36 questions.

At the end of the experiment, the pairs were asked to spend four uninterrupted minutes staring into each other's eyes.

"One key pattern associated with the development of a close relationship among peers is sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure," the Arons and their fellow researchers write in the paper. "The core of the method we developed was to structure such self-disclosure between strangers."

The questions are designed to help two people gradually reveal more and more about themselves, as well as identify ways in which they're similar to each other and say the things they like about each other out loud.

This combination of self-disclosure, perceived similarities, and being open to getting close to each other is what's been found to accelerate the creation of feelings of closeness and intimacy.

That said, as Elaine Aron notes in a Psychology Today blog post, the questions weren't specifically designed to help people fall in love—they're simply about creating closeness.

The 36 questions are designed to help two strangers develop feelings of closeness and intimacy.

They may or may not "fall in love," but the Arons' research has shown they are effective at creating intimacy.

"We should also emphasize that the goal of our procedure was to develop a temporary feeling of closeness, not an actual ongoing relationship," the researchers write in the paper.