Posted January 22, 2015 by Tristan Colasito

“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. Love didn’t happen to us. We’re in love because we each made the choice to be.”

Inspired by a study done 20 years ago, two individuals try to fall in love with each other by roughly replicating the procedure done in the study. The goal of the study was to find some ways of generating closeness. To put it in another way, how to make two strangers become closer.

One group of participants were assigned to the set of small talk questions while another group of participants were assigned to the set of closeness questions. For fifteen minutes, the researchers would ask the participants to ask each other the questions provided by them. After the first fifteen minutes have passed, the participants are then given another set of questions to ask each other. This is repeated for a third time. The next fifteen minutes was allotted for post interaction wherein the participants would assess how closer they think they got. This includes answering the question, “How you wish your relationship with your partner had been at the end of the experiment”

Results show that one of the ways to generate closeness is to ask personal questions that allow both parties to disclose information about his or herself. An example of the questions provided to the participants is: “Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?” Questions like these allow both parties to generate trust and intimacy for each other, which are then translated to closeness.

The questions provided in the study can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/fashion/no-37-big-wedding-or-small.html

To know more, read: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/fashion/modern-love-to-fall-in-love-with-anyone-do-this.html?referrer=&_r=0

Study: http://tinyurl.com/generatingcloseness

Photo taken from: motivatinggiraffe.com