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.
Let me explain. Earlier in the evening, that man had said: “I suspect, given a few commonalities, you could fall in love with anyone. If so, how do you choose someone?”
He was a university acquaintance I occasionally ran into at the climbing gym and had thought, “What if？” I had gotten a glimpse into his days on Instagram. But this was the first time we had hung out one-on-one.
“Actually, psychologists have tried making people fall in love,” I said, remembering Dr. Aron’s study. “It’s fascinating. I’ve always wanted to try it.”
I first read about the study when I was in the midst of a breakup. Each time I thought of leaving, my heart overruled my brain. I felt stuck. So, like a good academic, I turned to science, hoping there was a way to love smarter.
I explained the study to my university acquaintance. A heterosexual man and woman enter the lab through separate doors. They sit face to face and answer a series of increasingly personal questions. Then they stare silently into each other’s eyes for four minutes. The most tantalizing detail: Six months later, two participants were married. They invited the entire lab to the ceremony.
“Let’s try it,” he said.
Let me acknowledge the ways our experiment already fails to line up with the study. First, we were in a bar, not a lab. Second, we weren’t strangers. Not only that, but I see now that one neither suggests nor agrees to try an experiment designed to create romantic love if one isn’t open to this happening.
I Googled Dr. Aron’s questions; there are 36. We spent the next two hours passing my iPhone across the table, alternately posing each question.
They began innocuously: “Would you like to be famous? In what way?” And “When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?”
But they quickly became probing.
In response to the prompt, “Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common,” he looked at me and said, “I think we’re both interested in each other.”
I grinned and gulped my beer as he listed two more commonalities I then promptly forgot. We exchanged stories about the last time we each cried, and confessed the one thing we’d like to ask a fortuneteller. We explained our relationships with our mothers.
The questions reminded me of the infamous boiling frog experiment in which the frog doesn’t feel the water getting hotter until it’s too late. With us, because the level of vulnerability increased gradually, I didn’t notice we had entered intimate territory until we were already there, a process that can typically take weeks or months.
I liked learning about myself through my answers, but I liked learning things about him even more. The bar, which was empty when we arrived, had filled up by the time we paused for a bathroom break.
I sat alone at our table, aware of my surroundings for the first time in an hour, and wondered if anyone had been listening to our conversation. If they had, I hadn’t noticed. And I didn’t notice as the crowd thinned and the night got late.
We all have a narrative of ourselves that we offer up to strangers and acquaintances, but Dr. Aron’s questions make it impossible to rely on that narrative. Ours was the kind of accelerated intimacy I remembered from summer camp, staying up all night with a new friend, exchanging the details of our short lives. At 13, away from home for the first time, it felt natural to get to know someone quickly. But rarely does adult life present us with such circumstances.
The moments I found most uncomfortable were not when I had to make confessions about myself, but had to venture opinions about my partner. For example: “Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner, a total of five items” (Question 22), and “Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time saying things you might not say to someone you’ve just met” (Question 28).
Much of Dr. Aron’s research focuses on creating interpersonal closeness. In particular, several studies investigate the ways we incorporate others into our sense of self. It’s easy to see how the questions encourage what they call “self-expansion.” Saying things like, “I like your voice, your taste in beer, the way all your friends seem to admire you,” makes certain positive qualities belonging to one person explicitly valuable to the other.
It’s astounding, really, to hear what someone admires in you. I don’t know why we don’t go around thoughtfully complimenting one another all the time.
We finished at midnight, taking far longer than the 90 minutes for the original study. Looking around the bar, I felt as if I had just woken up. “That wasn’t so bad,” I said. “Definitely less uncomfortable than the staring into each other’s eyes part would be.”
He hesitated and asked. “Do you think we should do that, too?”
“Here?” I looked around the bar. It seemed too weird, too public.
“We could stand on the bridge,” he said, turning toward the window.
The night was warm and I was wide-awake. We walked to the highest point, then turned to face each other. I fumbled with my phone as I set the timer.
“O.K.,” I said, inhaling sharply.
“O.K.,” he said, smiling.
I’ve skied steep slopes and hung from a rock face by a short length of rope, but staring into someone’s eyes for four silent minutes was one of the more thrilling and terrifying experiences of my life. I spent the first couple of minutes just trying to breathe properly. There was a lot of nervous smiling until, eventually, we settled in.
I know the eyes are the windows to the soul or whatever, but the real crux of the moment was not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me. Once I embraced the terror of this realization and gave it time to subside, I arrived somewhere unexpected.
I felt brave, and in a state of wonder. Part of that wonder was at my own vulnerability and part was the weird kind of wonder you get from saying a word over and over until it loses its meaning and becomes what it actually is: an assemblage of sounds.
So it was with the eye, which is not a window to anything but a rather clump of very useful cells. The sentiment associated with the eye fell away and I was struck by its astounding biological reality: the spherical nature of the eyeball, the visible musculature of the iris and the smooth wet glass of the cornea. It was strange and exquisite.
When the timer buzzed, I was surprised — and a little relieved. But I also felt a sense of loss. Already I was beginning to see our evening through the surreal and unreliable lens of retrospect.
Most of us think about love as something that happens to us. We fall. We get crushed.
But what I like about this study is how it assumes that love is an action. It assumes that what matters to my partner matters to me because we have at least three things in common, because we have close relationships with our mothers, and because he let me look at him.
I wondered what would come of our interaction. If nothing else, I thought it would make a good story. But I see now that the story isn’t about us; it’s about what it means to bother to know someone, which is really a story about what it means to be known.
It’s true you can’t choose who loves you, although I’ve spent years hoping otherwise, and you can’t create romantic feelings based on convenience alone. Science tells us biology matters; our pheromones and hormones do a lot of work behind the scenes.
But despite all this, I’ve begun to think love is a more pliable thing than we make it out to be. Arthur Aron’s study taught me that it’s possible — simple, even — to generate trust and intimacy, the feelings love needs to thrive.
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.
Love didn’t happen to us. We’re in love because we each made the choice to be.
20多年前，心理学家亚瑟艾隆在他的实验室里曾经成功地让两个陌生人彼此相爱。去年夏天，我亲自验证了他的学说，那是一天深夜，我无法解释我怎么站在桥上盯着一个男人的眼睛看了四分钟。
那就让我解释一下。傍晚时分那个男人说道：‘’我一直怀疑，只给两个人一点共性，你就会爱上任何一个陌生人。如果事实如此，那你又是如何在茫茫人海中选中一个人的？”
他是我大学偶然跑进攀岩室认识的，之后我想过我可能在ins瞥过几眼。但是这是我们第一次面对面一起闲逛。
“事实上，心理学家一直都在想办法让人们互相陷入爱情里”，想到专家艾隆的学说说道。“真不可思议，我一直想尝试一下”。
在我第一次读到这个学说是我刚分手的时候。每次一想到分开，我的心就会左右了我的大脑。我束手无策。因此就像这个优秀的学说一样，我开始思考科学的方面，希望能有更聪明去爱别人的方法。
我把这个学说解释给我这个大学朋友。在两扇单独的门后一对异性恋男女参加了这个实验。他们面对面坐着然后各自回答了一些私人问题。之后他们两互相注释了对方四分钟。最诱人的是六个月之后，他们两便结婚了。结婚仪式上他们邀请了所有参加实验的人。
“让我们试试”，他说。
我觉得方法就是我们的经历否定这个学说。第一我们不是在实验室而是在酒吧见面。第二我们不是陌生人。不仅这样，而且我现在知道如果一个人没有让这件事情发生，那么他既不会建议也不会同意去尝试这个已经被设计好的浪漫爱情经历。
我搜索过专家艾隆的问题：一共有36个。我们只是在接下来的两个小时在桌子上通过我的手机有选择性的回答了每一个问题。
这些问题起初都很普通：“你喜欢让自己变得很有名吗？喜欢什么方式？”还有“你最后一次为自己唱歌是什么时候？为别人唱呢?”
之后的问题就变得很有调查性。
回答提示内容“说出三件你和你的同伴相似的地方”，他看着我说道：“我觉得我们都对对方挺感兴趣的”。
当他写完我们两个人的两处相同点时候我咧嘴笑着喝着我的啤酒迅速就忘了。然后我们分享了最后一次让我们哭泣的事。我们也都承认我们都喜欢做一个幸运的倾听者。我们还诉说了和自己妈妈的关系。
这些问题让我想起了臭名昭著的青蛙实验，直到水滚烫青蛙才能意识到渐渐加热着的水。我们之间，因为敏感程度渐渐的增加，直到已经站在对方心里的时候才意识到我们原来在这，而通常这个过程需要好几周甚至是几个月的时间。
我喜欢通过我回答的答案来了解自己，但是我更喜欢了解他的事。在我们刚到的时候酒吧是空的，当我们去洗手间休息的时候酒吧已经人满。
我肚子坐在桌子上，意识到一个小时之前周围的环境，想着是否会有人听到我们的谈话。如果有人我也意识不到。我深知意识不到稀疏的人群和天色渐黑。
我们都有要讲给陌生人和熟悉之人的故事，但是专家艾隆让我们不在依据这些故事相处。
我知道夏令营会加速人们的亲密程度，和一个新朋友一起待一晚上就会改变两个人生活的一些小细节。在13岁第一次离家的时候，很自然的就会想快速的认识新朋友。但是成年时期就不会有这样的环境。
最让我感觉不舒服的不是我必须为我的自白而是我不得不和对方冒昧说出我的想法。例如：“有选择性的分享你觉得对方的一些正面的性格特点，一共列成五条”（第22个问题），“告诉对方你最欣赏他的什么，一定要诚实的说出这些你不会对刚见面的人说出的这些话”（第28个问题）。
专家艾隆的调查主要用于发现人与人之间的亲密度。尤其是一些研究中调查了我们把其他人纳入我们自我感的方式。这样就很容易知道这些问题是怎么促进人们间的自我拓展。就好像说着这些话：“我喜欢你的声音，喜欢你喝酒的品味，你所有的朋友好像都欣赏着你。”能直截了当的说一些对方正面性的品质特征对另一个人来说都是十分珍贵的。
听到其他人说欣赏你是十分令人吃惊的。我不知道我们为什么不对周围的人体贴的说出我们一直欣赏他的地方。
我们是在深夜完成这个实验的，起初这个研究远了90分钟。看着酒吧周围，我感觉我好想也有略微清醒的时候。“这也算太糟糕”，我和自己说。“肯定比两个人互相注视来的舒服。”
他有点怀疑的问道：“你也觉得我们应该那样做吗？”
“在这儿吗？”我环顾着酒吧四周。觉得好笑这样太奇怪，太大张旗鼓。
“我们应该站在桥上”，他转过去看着窗说道。
这是一个温暖的夜晚，我也十分清醒。我们一起走到桥最高的地方，然后转过脸相望。我笨手笨脚的拿起我的手机定下时间。
“准备好了”，我深深的吸了一口气说。
“好的”他微笑着说。
我曾经爬过最陡峭的斜坡，也曾经系着短绳倒挂在岩壁上，但是盯着别人的眼睛四分钟是我人生中做过的最心惊胆战的事情。我用两分钟尽力让自己平静的呼吸。一直都是很紧张的微笑着直到最后我们平静下来。
我知道眼睛是心灵的窗户，可是不管是什么，真正的关键是那一刻我看到了不仅仅是我在看着一个人，而是我在看着一个真真正正想了解我的人。但是一旦我接受了这个恐怖的意识并且给它时间让他平息的时候，我已经到达了一个我不曾想到的高度。
我感到勇敢还觉得好奇。一部分是因为好奇感本就是我自己的弱点，而另一部分好奇的是你一个字一遍又一遍的说着它它却失去了意义最后成为了声音的集合。
因此声音要和眼神相辅相成，眼神虽然不是能解决任何事情的一扇窗户却也是弥足重要的一部分。情感随着眼神的消失而衰退，并且我迷上了生物学现实上的这个东西：眼珠是自然的球状，显而易见的虹膜组织还有光滑湿润的玻璃角膜。眼睛多么不可思议，又是多么精致。
计时器嗡嗡响的时候我还很惊讶——也慢慢放松了下来。我早已通过这个离奇又不可靠的回顾镜头看到了我们这一下午的经历。
大多数人都认为爱就发生在我们身边。我们陷入爱情，我们迷恋爱情。
但是我喜欢这个学说的原因就是想成是一种行为。它假设出来的东西对我和我的同伴来说都很重要，因为我们至少都有三点相似之处，因为我们都和妈妈有着亲密的关系，因为它允许我盯着他看。
我想知道让我们相互交流的是什么。如果什么都没有，那么这会是一个好故事。但是我明明看到了这个故事不仅仅是只有关于我们俩，是关于到底是什么让我们愿意了解他人，这也是一个真正需要被人们所知道其中意义的故事。
不能选择去爱谁是真实的，尽管我一直希望我可以。而且一个人也不能根据自己需要独自长造出浪漫的感觉。科学却告诉我们生物学的一些问题；我们的信息激素和荷尔蒙也在幕后做着许多工作。
但是抛开这些，我起初认为爱是比我们想象的更复杂的东西。亚瑟艾隆的学说让我觉得爱可能就是最简单的——爱是产生信任和亲密，爱的感觉需要发展。
你可能想知道我和他是否真的彼此相爱。是的，我们相爱了。尽管很难全部归功于这个学说（它可能以其他形式发生），这个学说确实给了我们一段经过深思熟虑后的关系。我们用了几周的时间来思考那天晚上我们创造的私密空间，等待着看它什么时候成真。
爱不是偶然发生的。我们相互作出的选择让我们相爱。