Post-Valentine’s Day: The 36 questions that are reported to spark intimacy

Around the time of the ‘Summer of Love’ in 1967, Arthur Aron, then a University of California Berkeley graduate student in psychology, kissed fellow student Elaine Spaulding. What they felt at that moment was so profound that they soon married and teamed up to investigate the mysteries of attraction and intimacy.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

“I fell in love very intensely,” said Aron, now a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley and research professor at Stony Brook University in New York. “Given that I was studying social psychology, just for fun I looked for the research on love, but there was almost none.”

So he took it on. In the nearly 50 years that Arthur and Elaine Aron have studied love, they have developed three dozen questions to create closeness in a lab setting. The result is not unlike the accelerated intimacy that can happen between strangers on an airplane or other close quarters.

Those 36 questions were recently popularized in a Modern Love column in The  New York Times, and have broken down emotional barriers between thousands of strangers, resulting in friendships, romance and even some marriages. Examples of the questions include [see page 2 for all 36 questions]:

Would you like to be famous? In what way?

Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?

If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet?

The latest adaptation of the 36-question method brings together two couples who don’t know one another. Each of the four participants must answer the questions out loud.