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.

二十多年前，心理学家亚瑟艾伦在他的实验室里成功让两个陌生人坠入爱河。去年夏天，我应用了他的方法。接下来的午夜时分，我在一座大桥上和一个男子对视了整整四分钟。

让我来解释一下前因后果。那晚早些时候，那位先生对我说：“我认为人与人之间只要有一些共同点，就有可能会爱上对方。真要这样的话，你该怎么选中命定的爱人呢？”

他是我大学里的一个朋友，那天偶然在攀岩馆里碰到。“要是……”我的心动了一下。这之前我只会在Instagram上偶尔瞥一眼他的日常生活。这还是我们第一次单独在外面碰面。

“事实上，心理学家曾试着撮合人们相爱。”我想起艾伦博士的研究，开口说道。“挺有意思的，我一直想试试呢。”

我第一次读到这篇研究的时候，正处在分手期。每次理智想要分手，情感就会跳出来否定。进退维谷的我想到了诉诸科学，希望科学能告诉我怎样更有智慧的爱一个人。

我把这项研究讲给我的大学同事。一对异性恋男女从不同的门走进实验室。他们面对面坐下来，回答一系列个人化的问题。然后，双方默默注视对方的眼睛四分钟。最有意思的细节是：半年后，两名参与者结婚了。他们邀请实验室的所有同事参加婚礼。

“咱们试试吧。”他对我说。

先来说说我们这个实验对比研究有差异的地方。第一，我们是在酒吧进行，而非实验室。第二，我们不是陌生人。不止如此，后来我在想，如果一个人真对这种形式不感冒，那他就不会建议甚至同意参加这种设计来制造浪漫感觉的实验了。

我用谷歌搜索了艾伦博士的36个问题。接下来的两个小时，我的手机在桌子上来回传递，我们轮流向对方提问。

一开始的问题稀松平常，例如“你想出名吗？以什么方式呢？”或者“上一次你唱歌给自己听是什么时候？唱给别人呢？”

但问题很快变得深入了。

回答“说出你和同伴三个共同点”这个问题时，他看着我说“我们都对彼此有好感。”

我笑起来，赶紧吞下一口啤酒。他接着说出另外两个我们的共同点，但我很快抛之脑后。我们又分享了上一次各自哭泣的故事，坦白了我们会问占卜者的一件事，我们和母亲的关系等。

这些问题让我想起了那个臭名昭著的温水煮青蛙实验。实验中，青蛙意识到水温升高时已经太晚了。说到我们，因为问题是不断深入进行的，我根本没有意识到，我们已经进入彼此亲密关系才能进入的领域，而这通常需要花费数周甚至数月才能达到。

我喜欢通过自己的回答了解自身，也更喜欢通过问题了解他的为人。我们去的时候，酒吧还没什么人，但我们停下来去洗手间的时候，已经人满为患。

我一个人坐在座位上，一小时来第一次意识到我们所处的嘈杂环境。不知道是不是有人听到了我们刚才的对话。如果真有人偷听，我也丝毫没有注意到。我也忽视了人群散去，午夜降临。

我们和陌生人或熟人交往都有一定的套路。但是艾伦博士的问题却让套路变得无法奏效。这种拉近彼此的模式让我想起小时候的夏令营。一整晚和一个新朋友谈天说地，彼此交换不长人生的细节。13岁的时候，第一次离家，很快认识一个人是很自然的事。但是成年人却几乎没有这种机会去认识一个人。

最让我感觉难受的时刻不是对自己忏悔，而是敢于与同伴交流想法。比如“列举出5个你同伴的优点”，“告诉你的同伴你喜欢他什么”或是“诚实的说出你不会对第一次认识的人说出的话。”

艾伦博士的大部分问题意在创造人与人之间的亲密感。特别是，一些研究关注人们与他人相处的方式。显而易见，这种问题鼓励人们“自我延伸”。比如，“我喜欢你的声音，你对啤酒的品味，你的朋友对待你的方式。”会让人们了解对方的优点，进而珍视对方。

听到某人欣赏自己，还是挺让人惊喜的。我不知道为什么大家没有时常故互热情地赞美对方。

午夜的时候，我们才结束了问答，比艾伦博士的实验超出了90分钟。我环顾酒吧，感觉如梦如醒。“还不太难哈。”我说，“肯定比对视要容易的多。”

他迟疑了一下问我，“你觉得咱们应该继续对视这部分吗？”

“在这？”我环顾酒吧，感觉有点奇怪，人太多了。

“咱们可以去那边的桥上。”他朝窗户看了看，对我说。

那晚很暖，我却异常清醒。我们一起走到桥的最高处，面对面站立着。我摸索出手机，定了时。

“开始吧。”我深吸一口气。

“好的。”他笑着答。

我曾经吊在一根短绳上，在陡峭的悬崖边荡下。但这次与他沉默对视的四分钟却是我人生中最激动，最刺激的经历。一开始的几分钟，我得一直努力让自己呼吸平稳。一开始 ，我们互相紧张的笑，慢慢地，我们终于平静下来。

我知道眼睛是心灵的窗户。关键不是我一直望着谁心灵的窗户，关键是我望着的那个人也在看着我。当我真的战胜这种恐惧，慢慢平静下来，一种意想不到的感受涌上心头。

我感到前所未有的勇气，也体验到创造奇迹的感觉。奇迹的一部分是我战胜了自己的恐惧，另一部分就比较奇怪了，就像你重复说一个词语，它听起来会失去意义但它的本质也浮现出来：不过是一些声音的组合。

人的眼睛也如此。它并不是什么心灵的窗户，而不过是一堆细胞的组合。把对眼睛的情感剥离之后，我看到的是它令人震撼的生物学本质：球形的眼球，虹膜周围可见的肌肉组织，平滑湿润的晶状角膜。如此奇怪，又如此精致。

定时器按时响起，让人惊讶的是，我居然放松下来，但也有些怅然若失。回想起来，那一晚是如此的不真实。

我们大部分人都认为爱情是降临在自己身上的。我们爱上，我们着迷。

其实我喜欢这项研究的原因在于，它认为爱是一种行动，认为实验之所以能影响我和同伴，是因为我们至少有三个共同点。我们都和母亲有着亲密关系，因为他让我凝视他。

我很想知道彼此的互动会带来什么。即使我们彼此没什么感觉，这也会是个好故事。但现在我发现，重要的并不是我们有没有擦出爱情的火花。重要的是它让我们知道努力去了解一个人意味着什么，而让别人了解自己又意味着什么。

诚然，你不能决定谁会爱上你。这些年来，我一直这么希望，然而你却不能指望一个人待着就创造出浪漫的爱情。科学告诉我们，爱情受生物因素左右，信息素和荷尔蒙在背后起着重要作用。

尽管如此，我开始觉得爱情比我们想的容易得到。亚瑟艾伦的实验也告诉我们确实可能。因为信任感和亲密感很容易获得，而这正是爱情生发的土壤。

你可能很想知道他和我是否坠入爱河。是的，确实如此。尽管很难证明是否是实验的功劳（也许只是凑巧），研究确实给我们给我们提供了可行的相处方式。那晚之后，我们在这种亲密氛围中又相处了几周，想看看到底会发生什么。

爱情并不是就这么发生了，我们爱上对方，因为这是我们彼此的选择。