explainer · 7 min read
The 36 questions to fall in love began as a 1997 study on closeness. Try 3 this week.
A 45-minute lab experiment with strangers became a viral love story in 2015. What the research found, and which questions to start with.
By ThriveBrook editors · Updated October 2026
The 36 questions come from a 1997 paper in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Psychologist Arthur Aron, his wife and fellow researcher Elaine Aron, and three colleagues paired up college students who had never met and handed them a list to work through for 45 minutes. It starts with easy questions, gets more personal as it goes, and the two people take turns answering every item.
You can try a small piece of it this week, no lab or stranger required. Pick 3 questions from the first set in the table below and bring them to dinner with a partner, a friend or a parent.
How the 45 minutes worked
The list comes in three sets of 12, and each set gets about 15 minutes. Questions 1 to 12 are light enough for a first meeting. Questions 13 to 24 move into values and memories, and questions 25 to 36 ask the two people to talk about each other and about things they rarely say out loud.
Not every item is a question. Number 11 reads, “Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.” Others ask you to trade compliments or to name three things you seem to have in common. Both people answer each item, and a different person goes first each time.
The small-talk group was the yardstick in the first of the paper’s three studies. Pairs who worked through the escalating list rated themselves closer to their partner afterward than pairs who spent the same time on small talk.
Why taking turns builds closeness
Aron had a dry name for the pattern the list copies: “sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure.” In everyday words, two people keep talking, each round gets a little more personal, and neither one does all the sharing. That’s roughly how a friendship forms over months, squeezed into one sitting.
The other two studies tested what else might matter, and the answer was very little. Pairs got no measurably closer when they were matched on important attitudes, when they were told to expect they’d like each other, or when getting close was made an explicit goal. You don’t need to agree with the other person, or even set out to get close, for the list to help.
That’s good news for a family dinner, where nobody signed up for an experiment. If one person ends up interviewing the other, stop and let them ask you the next one.
The later sets get heavier
The wording below follows the version that the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley publishes. Read all 12 in a set before you bring it to the table.
| Set | Sample question |
|---|---|
| 1 | Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest? |
| 1 | Would you like to be famous? In what way? |
| 1 | What would constitute a “perfect” day for you? |
| 2 | If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future, or anything else, what would you want to know? |
| 2 | What do you value most in a friendship? |
| 2 | What is your most treasured memory? |
| 3 | Make three true “we” statements each. For instance, “We are both in this room feeling…“ |
| 3 | Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life. |
| 3 | When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself? |
Set 2 also asks about your most terrible memory and your relationship with your mother, and Set 3 asks whose death in your family would hit you hardest.
Skip any question that would hurt someone at the table, especially a person who is grieving.
How a 2015 essay made it famous
For 18 years the list mostly lived in psychology papers. Then in January 2015 the New York Times Modern Love column ran “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This,” by Mandy Len Catron, a writer who now teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia. She had tried the questions the summer before with a man she knew, though not well, and afterward the two of them stared into each other’s eyes without speaking for four minutes.
They fell in love. The essay spread so fast that the paper ran a Valentine’s Day follow-up of readers’ own attempts, which went with varying degrees of success, in Catron’s words.
When Catron spoke about the essay later that year, the question she said she heard most was whether the two of them were still together. They were.
Two details from her story get repeated as if they came from the study. One is the four-minute stare. In a TEDx talk in August 2015, Catron said the version she tried, with the eye contact added, was never published. The other is the story that two participants married six months later and invited the whole lab to the ceremony, which Catron herself called a rumor.
If you want to add the stare, treat it as Catron’s extra step and do the questions first.
What the study never claimed
The 1997 paper was about closeness, not romance. Its main result was how close people felt right after one 45-minute conversation, which is a long way from a lasting relationship.
Catron made the same point on stage. She described a student who told her, “So, I tried your study, and it didn’t work.” His partner, he said, just wanted to be friends. When Catron asked whether they had gotten to know each other, he nodded. “So, then it worked,” she told him.
Use her test on your own try. Afterward, ask whether you learned something about the other person you didn’t know at the start. And if a relationship is already struggling, 36 questions won’t stand in for a couples counselor.
Who uses the questions now
Researchers kept using the list long after 1997. OpenAlex, an open index of research papers, counts more than 900 works that cite it, and many borrow the procedure itself to bring strangers closer in a lab.
In a 2008 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Elizabeth Page-Gould, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton and Linda Tropp paired Latino and white students for 3 friendship meetings. For students who started out most wary of the other group, the spike in cortisol, a hormone the body releases under stress, shrank across those meetings.
A 2022 paper in the same journal, by Michael Kardas, Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley, helps explain why people don’t talk this way more often. In a series of experiments, strangers expected deep conversations to feel more awkward than they turned out to be, and they underestimated how much the other person cared about what they shared. After trying both kinds of talk, people felt more connected to their deep-conversation partner.
None of this requires a stranger. A couple married for a decade may find Set 2 more interesting than Set 1, since each already knows who the other would invite to dinner. With older relatives, Set 1 is plenty for one evening.
Ask 3 at dinner
Choose 3 questions from Set 1 you’d honestly like to hear answered, then ask them at dinner this week, each of you answering every one in turn.