The 36 Questions to Fall in Love: What the Study Really Found

Where the questions come from

The questions come from a paper published in 1997 in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by the psychologist Arthur Aron and colleagues. Its title is not romantic at all: "The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings."

That title tells you what the researchers were after. They weren't trying to make anyone fall in love. They were trying to solve a practical problem in their field. Closeness between people is hard to study, because you can't easily create it on demand in a laboratory. Researchers who wanted to study close relationships usually had to recruit people who were already close, which limits what can be tested in a controlled experiment. The researchers wanted a reliable procedure that could produce a measurable sense of closeness between two people who had never met, within a single session.

What the researchers actually did

The procedure is simple to describe. Two participants who didn't know each other, students in the original studies, sat together and took turns asking and answering questions from a set of cards. The questions came in three sets. Each set was more personal than the one before: the early questions were easy to answer, and the later ones asked for more self-disclosure, more vulnerability and more direct statements about the other person.

Two features of that design turned out to matter.

• The disclosure was gradual. Nobody was asked to reveal something deeply personal in the first minute. The intimacy built step by step.
• It was reciprocal. Both people asked, both answered, in turn. Neither was simply interviewing the other.

To see whether the questions themselves made a difference, the researchers compared this with pairs who spent the same kind of session on small-talk questions instead: pleasant, ordinary topics that didn't escalate.

At the end, participants rated how close they felt to their partner. One of the measures was a scale Aron and colleagues had developed earlier, the Inclusion of Other in the Self scale, which asks people to choose between pairs of circles that overlap more or less, to show how much the other person feels like part of their own world.

What they found, and what they didn't

The headline result is clear. Pairs who went through the escalating, reciprocal questions reported feeling closer to each other than pairs who spent the session on small talk. Structured, progressive self-disclosure, done in turn, generated a sense of closeness between strangers, and did so reliably enough to be used as a research tool.

What the paper did not claim matters just as much.

• It measured closeness, not love. Feeling close to someone after a conversation is not the same as falling for them.
• It was about strangers, not couples. The participants met for the first time in the study.
• It was designed for research. The procedure was meant to help scientists study closeness, not to serve as a dating technique.

None of that makes the finding less striking. It simply puts it in proportion. A well-built conversation can make two people feel noticeably closer in a short time. That is already a lot.

How it became "fall in love"

For years, the study was known mainly to researchers. That changed in January 2015, when the writer Mandy Len Catron published an essay in the New York Times "Modern Love" column titled "To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This." The essay describes trying the questions with an acquaintance, followed by four minutes of looking into each other's eyes in silence, and how the two of them did, in fact, fall in love.

The essay spread enormously, and the questions spread with it, often with the four minutes of eye contact attached as a closing step. The phrase "36 questions to fall in love" comes from that moment, not from the original paper.

Why it still works for couples who already know each other

If the study was about strangers, is there any point in trying it with someone you've shared a life with for years?

There is, for a simple reason. The two ingredients that made the procedure work, gradual disclosure and reciprocity, are exactly what tends to disappear in long relationships. Couples talk constantly, but mostly about logistics. They rarely take turns answering the same question, and they almost never let a conversation climb step by step toward something personal. The structure that helped strangers get closer can help partners rediscover what they stopped asking.

That said, the original questions were written for people meeting for the first time. Many of them would feel strange between people who already know each other's childhood, family and plans.

A version written for couples

That's why we wrote our own. Dareling's 36 questions are not the questions from the study, and they don't paraphrase them. They are new questions, written for a couple who already know each other and want to fall for each other again. They keep what the research suggests matters, three rounds of twelve, each more intimate than the last, and then turn it around: in The Mirror, you don't tell your own story, you guess your partner's. Each question is about the person reading it, and the other answers on their behalf.

If you have an hour and a quiet room, start the first round right now.

If an hour feels like a lot for a weeknight, the same principle works in smaller doses. One good question a night, asked and answered in turn, is the idea behind a ten-minute nightly ritual. And our list of 50 questions gives you plenty to choose from.

What to take from it

The lasting lesson of the 36 questions isn't a magic number. It's that closeness responds to structure: to turns, to escalation, to the courage of answering a little more honestly than the moment requires. Couples who have been together for years don't lack that capacity. They usually just lack the occasion.

A game can be that occasion. It's what we try to build at Dareling, one question, one dare, one shared answer at a time. For something quicker and more playful built on the same instinct, try never have I ever, where you bet on your partner's answer before they give it.