Can you choose whom you fall in love with? Maybe.
A writer tried a lab experiment designed to make people fall in love, and it worked, Jacquie Miller writes.
Can you choose to fall in love with someone?
Mandy Len Catron and her date, Mark, tested the age-old question by repeating a laboratory experiment designed by a psychologist more than 20 years ago to prompt people to fall in love.
First they asked each other a series of 36 questions. The first few were easy: “What person would you choose as a dinner guest?” But they became increasingly intimate: “Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing ?”
Then Mandy and Mark stared into each other’s eyes for four minutes.
The essay that Catron wrote for the New York Times about the experience was read by millions of people, and it’s at the core of her intriguing book, How to Fall in Love with Anyone, which weaves stories of her own relationships with the history and science of love.
The love experiment worked, by the way. Mandy and Mark now live together in Vancouver, where she teaches English and creative writing at the University of British Columbia.
This newspaper chatted with Catron recently about making choices, finding love and what’s in the contract.
Q You describe how you spent your date with Mark asking each other a series of questions that allowed you to be less guarded with each other and escalated the process of intimacy, which can normally take weeks or months. Why was that such a powerful technique?
A I think that process just makes you feel this deep sense of connection. It’s like the way you would talk to someone you know very deeply, or that you’ve known for a long time. It creates that process over a couple of hours instead of a much longer time period.
Q Do you think in order to create that sense of intimacy with someone it’s necessary to have some underlying connection with the person? If you did the questions with anyone, would it have the same result?
A Lots of researchers have looked at the question in a lot of different contexts, and it seems like a very consistent way to create that type of closeness between people. I have heard from people who have tried it, and I think the process is not perfect, but pretty consistent, pretty reliable, in creating that sense of trust and intimacy.
Q What do they say?
A I hear from people all the time, it’s kind of amazing. I’ve heard people who say, “We just got married!” or, “That was our first date and we’re still together!’”
I’ve also heard from people who have done it on a date with someone and the person seemed a bit resistant, and that was a sign this wasn’t a good person for them to be in a relationship with.
One woman said she used the questions with her sister, who was in a hospice with a terminal illness. They had been estranged for many years and she saw it as a way they could connect at the end of her sister’s life. An incredible story.
Q You say doing the quiz makes it impossible for people to rely on the standard narrative of their life that they typically offer up to a stranger.
A I think we all have this idea about who we are. When I did these questions with Mark, I was doing online dating at the time. And I often felt like, on these dates, you are meeting someone new for the first time, and you have this story you tell of who you are, these details about your identify that you communicate to other people. What I found was so amazing about doing those questions was that you cannot rely too heavily on those details. You are not really in charge of this narrative about who I am. You are getting to know someone in a more nuanced way.
Q Why do you think people are so fascinated with the question of whether you can, at some level, choose the person you love?
A I think it’s very empowering … and people want to feel empowered. The other thing is that it is kind of an alternative to online dating, where you have this incredible pool of potential partners, you have more interactions with people, but they are more superficial. People feel frustrated. They want intimacy. We want other people to see who we are, and so often online dating doesn’t make a space for that. This idea of deeply connecting with another person is a real alternative to the kind of job-interview dates that often result (from online dating.)
Q So what happens on the second date when the questions are over?
A (Laughs.) Even on the first date, after you’ve done the questions, I remember feeling like, “We need to revert back to small talk.” It was hard to switch back to a superficial way of relating. It was nice because we didn’t start dating, we just left things open, and that was comfortable for me. Normally that ambiguity — that, “Let’s wait and see what happens” — is not something I’m good at. But it was like, “I really like this person, I feel like I know him. And whatever happens, we’ll just see.”
Q In your book, you point out that there aren’t many stories about ambivalent love relationships because they don’t tend to confirm our assumptions about the power of love. But your book is full of ambivalence: Are you in love? Will it last? Should you get together? Break up? Why are there so few stories about what is probably a very common modern experience of ambivalence in love?
A We are really invested in certain ideas about love. And one of those ideas is that it’s a very powerful force that acts on us. And we like this idea. And someone in love does feel that way. But when you imagine that love is this intense force that acts on our lives, that sort of frees us from being thoughtful about it, from making hard decisions about who we want to invest in and how we want to spend our time. And that’s appealing. There’s something very comfortable about feeling, “Oh, I’m not in charge here.” But I think that leads, often, to not great decisions.
Love has such a great impact on our lives. It seems like a mistake to just sort of turn that over to fate, or destiny, or whatever you want to call it.
It’s like the way you would talk to someone you know very deeply, or that you’ve known for a long time. It creates that process over a couple of hours instead of a much longer time period. Mandy Len Catron