Forcing People to Fall in Love

Loving somebody and maintaining a relationship can be a lot of work, but perhaps starting one can be really simple and easy. More than twenty years ago, psychologist Arthur Aron succeeded in making two strangers fall in love in his laboratory.

It was around the summer of 1967 when Arthur Aron, a UC Berkeley graduate student in psychology, fell in love with fellow student, Elaine Spaulding. Just for fun, Aron looked for research on love, but there was almost none on the subject. He then decided to take it on himself. In the nearly 50 years that Arthur and Elaine Aron have studied love, they developed three dozen questions to create closeness in a lab setting. The questions come in three sets of 12 and grow increasingly intense. The result is similar to the accelerated intimacy that can happen between strangers on an airplane or other close quarters.

The latest adaptation of this method brings together two couples who don’t know one another. The four participants must answer the questions out loud. This variation was filmed on campus for a Valentine’s Day segment on NBC’s Today Show. Aron, now 69, who handed out the question cards for the on-camera experiment, hopes the segment captures the poignancy of the pairs revealing their deepest hopes, dreams and worries. “When I came in towards the end of each set of questions, there were people crying and talking so openly. It was amazing,” Aron said. “They all seemed really moved by it.”

The questions have created friendships, sparked romantic relationships, used to study cross-race friendships to better understand prejudice, and even used to improve understanding between police officers and community members.