With Valentine’s Day celebrations taking place this past weekend, love seems to be a popular topic of discussion. The great thing about love is that it means something different to everyone. To some, falling in love is a pragmatic affair; you meet the person with whom you would like to spend the rest of your life, and you mutually agree to do just that. Yet for others, love is about experiencing all kinds of emotions and having a connection with someone that is unlike anything you’ve ever experienced. Some believe that love occurs without rhyme or reason and can happen randomly between two people at any time. However, others are investigating the source of this connection and are posing the question: Is there a science to falling in love?
In a recent New York Times article titled “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This,” writer Mandy Len Catron describes her recent experiment with love. She explains, “More than 20 years ago, the psychologist Arthur Aron succeeded in making two strangers fall in love in his laboratory. Last summer, I applied his technique in my own life, which is how I found myself standing on a bridge at midnight, staring into a man’s eyes for exactly four minutes.”
This certainly sounds interesting. Catron continues on to explain that after experiencing a significant heartbreak, “like a good academic, I turned to science, hoping there was a way to love smarter,” an understandable reaction to the pain that love can put you through. Intrigued by Dr. Aron’s scientific approach to love and curious about its potential, Catron ultimately decided to try it out for herself with an acquaintance. The study calls for only a few necessary components: you, another person, and a set of 36 questions.
During this intense and introspective conversation, some of the questions are about fairly casual topics, such as, “Would you like to be famous?”, while others prompt the participants to really open up to each other and share very personal information. An example of a more intimate and challenging question from the list is, “Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time saying things like you might not say to someone you’ve just met.” Crazy, right? The experiment concludes with four minutes of gazing into each other’s eyes without saying a word.
So, what were the results of this experiment for the author and her acquaintance? At the end of her piece, she acknowledges that, “You’re probably wondering if he and I fell in love. Well, we did. Although it’s hard to credit the study entirely (it may have happened anyway), the study did give us a way into a relationship that feels deliberate. We spent weeks in the intimate space we created that night, waiting to see what it could become.”
However, she still stresses that, “Love didn’t happen to us. We’re in love because we each made the choice to be.”
Do you agree with the idea behind this study? Is love something that can be manufactured and controlled? I’m sure the hopeless romantics out there are shouting angrily about this, and the believers in the power of soulmates are completely up in arms. What it really comes down to is this: is love a matter worked out in the head, or a sentiment felt by the heart?
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