Filmed August 2015 at TEDxChapmanU
Mandy Len Catron: Falling in love is the easy part
Did you know you can fall in love with anyone just by asking them 36 questions? Mandy Len Catron tried this experiment, it worked, and she wrote a viral article about it (that your mom probably sent you). But … is that real love? Did it last? And what’s the difference between falling in love and staying in love?
Transcript:
I published this article in the New York Times Modern Love column in January of this year. "To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This." And the article is about a psychological study designed to create romantic love in the laboratory, and my own experience trying the study myself one night last summer.
So the procedure is fairly simple: two strangers take turns asking each other 36 increasingly personal questions and then they stare into each other's eyes without speaking for four minutes.
So here are a couple of sample questions.
Number 12: If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?
Number 28: When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?
As you can see, they really do get more personal as they go along.
Number 30, I really like this one: Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things you might not say to someone you just met.
So when I first came across this study a few years earlier, one detail really stuck out to me, and that was the rumor that two of the participants had gotten married six months later, and they'd invited the entire lab to the ceremony. So I was of course very skeptical about this process of just manufacturing romantic love, but of course I was intrigued. And when I got the chance to try this study myself, with someone I knew but not particularly well, I wasn't expecting to fall in love. But then we did, and --
(Laughter)
And I thought it made a good story, so I sent it to the Modern Love column a few months later.
Now, this was published in January, and now it is August, so I'm guessing that some of you are probably wondering, are we still together? And the reason I think you might be wondering this is because I have been asked this question again and again and again for the past seven months. And this question is really what I want to talk about today. But let's come back to it.
(Laughter)
So the week before the article came out, I was very nervous. I had been working on a book about love stories for the past few years, so I had gotten used to writing about my own experiences with romantic love on my blog. But a blog post might get a couple hundred views at the most, and those were usually just my Facebook friends, and I figured my article in the New York Times would probably get a few thousand views. And that felt like a lot of attention on a relatively new relationship. But as it turned out, I had no idea.
So the article was published online on a Friday evening, and by Saturday, this had happened to the traffic on my blog. And by Sunday, both the Today Show and Good Morning America had called. Within a month, the article would receive over 8 million views, and I was, to say the least, underprepared for this sort of attention. It's one thing to work up the confidence to write honestly about your experiences with love, but it is another thing to discover that your love life has made international news -
(Laughter)
and to realize that people across the world are genuinely invested in the status of your new relationship.
(Laughter)
And when people called or emailed, which they did every day for weeks, they always asked the same question first: are you guys still together? In fact, as I was preparing this talk, I did a quick search of my email inbox for the phrase "Are you still together?" and several messages popped up immediately. They were from students and journalists and friendly strangers like this one. I did radio interviews and they asked. I even gave a talk, and one woman shouted up to the stage, "Hey Mandy, where's your boyfriend?" And I promptly turned bright red.
I understand that this is part of the deal. If you write about your relationship in an international newspaper, you should expect people to feel comfortable asking about it. But I just wasn't prepared for the scope of the response. The 36 questions seem to have taken on a life of their own. In fact, the New York Times published a follow-up article for Valentine's Day, which featured readers' experiences of trying the study themselves, with varying degrees of success.
So my first impulse in the face of all of this attention was to become very protective of my own relationship. I said no to every request for the two of us to do a media appearance together. I turned down TV interviews, and I said no to every request for photos of the two us. I think I was afraid that we would become inadvertent icons for the process of falling in love, a position I did not at all feel qualified for.
And I get it: people didn't just want to know if the study worked, they wanted to know if it really worked: that is, if it was capable of producing love that would last, not just a fling, but real love, sustainable love.
But this was a question I didn't feel capable of answering. My own relationship was only a few months old, and I felt like people were asking the wrong question in the first place. What would knowing whether or not we were still together really tell them? If the answer was no, would it make the experience of doing these 36 questions any less worthwhile? Dr. Arthur Aron first wrote about these questions in this study here in 1997, and here, the researcher's goal was not to produce romantic love. Instead, they wanted to foster interpersonal closeness among college students, by using what Aron called "sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure." Sounds romantic, doesn't it? But the study did work. The participants did feel closer after doing it, and several subsequent studies have also used Aron's fast friends protocol as a way to quickly create trust and intimacy between strangers. They've used it between members of the police and members of community, and they've used it between people of opposing political ideologies. The original version of the story, the one that I tried last summer, that pairs the personal questions with four minutes of eye contact, was referenced in this article, but unfortunately it was never published.
So a few months ago, I was giving a talk at a small liberal arts college, and a student came up to me afterwards and he said, kind of shyly, "So, I tried your study, and it didn't work." He seemed a little mystified by this. "You mean, you didn't fall in love with the person you did it with?" I asked.
"Well..." He paused. "I think she just wants to be friends."
"But did you become better friends?" I asked. "Did you feel like you got to really know each other after doing the study?" He nodded.
"So, then it worked," I said.
I don't think this is the answer he was looking for. In fact, I don't think this is the answer that any of us are looking for when it comes to love.
I first came across this study when I was 29 and I was going through a really difficult breakup. I had been in the relationship since I was 20, which was basically my entire adult life, and he was my first real love, and I had no idea how or if I could make a life without him. So I turned to science. I researched everything I could find about the science of romantic love, and I think I was hoping that it might somehow inoculate me from heartache. I don't know if I realized this at the time -- I thought I was just doing research for this book I was writing -- but it seems really obvious in retrospect. I hoped that if I armed myself with the knowledge of romantic love, I might never have to feel as terrible and lonely as I did then. And all this knowledge has been useful in some ways. I am more patient with love. I am more relaxed. I am more confident about asking for what I want. But I can also see myself more clearly, and I can see that what I want is sometimes more than can reasonably be asked for. What I want from love is a guarantee, not just that I am loved today and that I will be loved tomorrow, but that I will continue to be loved by the person I love indefinitely. Maybe it's this possibility of a guarantee that people were really asking about when they wanted to know if we were still together.
So the story that the media told about the 36 questions was that there might be a shortcut to falling in love. There might be a way to somehow mitigate some of the risk involved, and this is a very appealing story, because falling in love feels amazing, but it's also terrifying. The moment you admit to loving someone, you admit to having a lot to lose, and it's true that these questions do provide a mechanism for getting to know someone quickly, which is also a mechanism for being known, and I think this is the thing that most of us really want from love: to be known, to be seen, to be understood. But I think when it comes to love, we are too willing to accept the short version of the story. The version of the story that asks, "Are you still together?" and is content with a yes or no answer.
So rather than that question, I would propose we ask some more difficult questions, questions like: How do you decide who deserves your love and who does not? How do you stay in love when things get difficult, and how do you know when to just cut and run? How do you live with the doubt that inevitably creeps into every relationship, or even harder, how do you live with your partner's doubt? I don't necessarily know the answers to these questions, but I think they're an important start at having a more thoughtful conversation about what it means to love someone.
So, if you want it, the short version of the story of my relationship is this: a year ago, an acquaintance and I did a study designed to create romantic love, and we fell in love, and we are still together, and I am so glad.
But falling in love is not the same thing as staying in love. Falling in love is the easy part. So at the end of my article, I wrote, "Love didn't happen to us. We're in love because we each made the choice to be." And I cringe a little when I read that now, not because it isn't true, but because at the time, I really hadn't considered everything that was contained in that choice. I didn't consider how many times we would each have to make that choice, and how many times I will continue to have to make that choice without knowing whether or not he will always choose me. I want it to be enough to have asked and answered 36 questions, and to have chosen to love someone so generous and kind and fun and to have broadcast that choice in the biggest newspaper in America. But what I have done instead is turn my relationship into the kind of myth I don't quite believe in. And what I want, what perhaps I will spend my life wanting, is for that myth to be true.
I want the happy ending implied by the title to my article, which is, incidentally, the only part of the article that I didn't actually write.
(Laughter)
But what I have instead is the chance to make the choice to love someone, and the hope that he will choose to love me back, and it is terrifying, but that's the deal with love.
Thank you.
To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This
JAN. 9, 2015
Credit Brian Rea
Modern Love
By MANDY LEN CATRON
Updated, Feb. 13, 2015 |
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 rather a 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.
Mandy Len Catron teaches writing at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and is working on a book about the dangers of love stories.
Modern Love College Essay Contest
We invited college students nationwide to open their hearts and laptops and write an essay that tells the truth about what love is like for them today.
No. 37: Big Wedding or Small?
Quiz: The 36 Questions That Lead to Love
JAN. 9, 2015
Modern Love
By DANIEL JONES
Updated, Feb. 13, 2015 | To try the 36 questions described below, download our free app for your phone, tablet or other device.
In Mandy Len Catron’s Modern Love essay, “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This,” she refers to a study by the psychologist Arthur Aron (and others) that explores whether intimacy between two strangers can be accelerated by having them ask each other a specific series of personal questions. The 36 questions in the study are broken up into three sets, with each set intended to be more probing than the previous one.
The idea is that mutual vulnerability fosters closeness. To quote the study’s authors, “One key pattern associated with the development of a close relationship among peers is sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personal self-disclosure.” Allowing oneself to be vulnerable with another person can be exceedingly difficult, so this exercise forces the issue.
The final task Ms. Catron and her friend try — staring into each other’s eyes for four minutes — is less well documented, with the suggested duration ranging from two minutes to four. But Ms. Catron was unequivocal in her recommendation. “Two minutes is just enough to be terrified,” she told me. “Four really goes somewhere.”
Set I
1. Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?
2. Would you like to be famous? In what way?
3. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?
4. What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?
5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?
6. If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?
7. Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?
8. Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common.
9. For what in your life do you feel most grateful?
10. If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?
11. Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.
12. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?
Set II
13. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future or anything else, what would you want to know?
14. Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?
15. What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?
16. What do you value most in a friendship?
17. What is your most treasured memory?
18. What is your most terrible memory?
19. If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?
20. What does friendship mean to you?
21. What roles do love and affection play in your life?
22. Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner. Share a total of five items.
23. How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people’s?
24. How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?
Set III
25. Make three true “we” statements each. For instance, “We are both in this room feeling ... “
26. Complete this sentence: “I wish I had someone with whom I could share ... “
27. If you were going to become a close friend with your partner, please share what would be important for him or her to know.
28. Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things that you might not say to someone you’ve just met.
29. Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life.
30. When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?
31. Tell your partner something that you like about them already.
32. What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?
33. If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet?
34. Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why?
35. Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why?
36. Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how he or she might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.
Overcoming Love Addiction: One Apple Martini at a Time
AUG. 20, 2015
Credit Brian Rea
Modern Love
By PETER DeMARCO
I appeared as a love addict on a live morning television talk show in Detroit in the late 1980s, when I was 28. The producer, whom I knew through my job as a New York City book publicist, arranged for me to fly out to be a guest, along with an author who had written a book on love addiction.
In front of a studio audience, I shared how I had lost my mother at 15 and my father at 20, and had remained with my younger brother and sister in my childhood home, where I was still living as an adult. My goal was to be loved, I told them, and my obsessive need to fill an emotional emptiness had left me powerless to move forward with my life.The author confirmed that love addiction was as serious as heroin or alcohol dependency.
Ostensibly, I had flown to Detroit with the hope that a public sharing and meeting with a specialist could help me overcome my addiction. But after leaving the studio I flew to Pittsburgh for a blind date with a producer I had been flirting with by phone for the previous six months. I saw the Detroit trip as an excuse to call and ask if she would be free that Friday night. I said I would be in the area, by plane.
She was shocked and said she would love to meet me, then booked me into a hotel for the weekend.
After a taxi dropped me off in front of the Pittsburgh television station, my adrenaline from appearing on live TV had worn off, and I stood frozen beneath the giant call letters on the building, suitcase in hand, feeling like the scared, sad creature I had been all of my life, someone whose self-worth was dependent on a woman’s acceptance, and in this case, someone I had never met.
My weekend in Pittsburgh turned out to be the worst thing for a love addict: a storybook romance of candlelit dinners and hand-holding in the Mount Washington neighborhood. Two weeks later she came to visit me, and as we walked along a Long Island beach, arm in arm, I felt a high that no drug could ever top.
Two months later she moved west for a bigger job in a bigger market, and her late night “I miss you” phone calls stopped. I never saw her again.
During this period, I couldn’t function at work, couldn’t pick up the phone to do my job, didn’t even want the job anymore. I sat there in disbelief, wondering how someone who couldn’t stop staring into my eyes when we were together could suddenly be gone.
One day my boss walked into my office and handed me a piece of paper with a phone number. “Call her,” she said. “She saved my life.”
The number belonged to a therapist who had studied with Anna Freud.
I sat in therapy once a week, offering up my life to her. She told me I was taking 15 years of emotional life with my mother and placing that baggage onto each woman. She called them little deaths: Each time a woman rejected me I experienced the loss of my mother all over again.
I was also starting to go bald, which only fed my insecurities. I explored self-help and empowerment seminars and began to find confidence within myself, but it was easy to do when I wasn’t romantically attached.
When I was fired from a different publishing company for not being committed, I took the time off to prepare the house for sale. It was a difficult decision. The house had become a character in my life, something I needed to care for, because, according to the therapist, I was waiting for my parents to come home. “The subconscious dies hard,” she said.
I moved to New York, where I began to pursue an acting career and work temporary office jobs to make money.
One Memorial Day weekend, when I was 38, I had one of those better-than-scripted encounters, similar to what happened in Pittsburgh. Out to dinner with a group of friends, I ended up sitting next to a friend’s wife’s cousin, visiting from Los Angeles. She lived in Venice Beach and sold jewelry on the boardwalk.
The next day we went to Coney Island and rode the Cyclone roller coaster, which had always been one of my fantasy dates and something my parents had done when they met. It was the kind of date I had never gone on as a teenager.
Later, on Columbus Avenue, we stopped in one of those new martini bars. It was a Saturday afternoon, and the bar was empty. She ordered apple martinis. I said I didn’t like martinis, but she said to trust her.
They went down like candy. We danced to the Bee Gees on the jukebox; I kissed her.
After walking and talking for hours, we said good-night in front of my friend’s apartment. Then she said something odd: “You’ll probably be married by the next time I see you.”
I called three days later when she was back in L.A. and said I was ready to get on a plane, but she sounded aloof. I could hardly believe this was the same person from a few days earlier. “Let’s just see how things go,” she said.
I hung up in shock, knowing it was over. I hated myself for sounding, once again, too desperate, yet I felt powerless to stop the pattern of placing all of my hope in someone I hardly knew.
In my studio apartment, which lacked a view of the sky or of any greenery, I felt sealed off from the world and was reminded of the short story “The Cask of Amontillado,” in which a man is entombed behind a newly constructed brick wall.
I bought apple martini ingredients and played the Bee Gees. I stared at the chilled green liquid in the delicate glass with desperation, as if I could telepathically communicate with her.
The receptionist at my latest assignment, a young married woman from the Midwest who was studying to be a therapist, noticed my depressed body language and asked what was wrong.
“An apple martini,” I said cryptically, and told her the story.
She said I was worrying about the wrong things and that my problem was not having career direction. “You should become a teacher,” she said. “New York City needs teachers.”
It was an unusual thing to hear, since that subject had never come up in our conversations. But I was truly desperate, ready to hear something different. I was a writer and loved reading. And the year before, I had been a Big Brother mentor to an 11-year-old boy.
Two days later I applied to a new teaching program that was looking for non-teachers to be trained and placed inside the city’s neediest schools. They would also pay for a master’s degree.
For my interview in front of a small group of candidates and interviewers, I created an English lesson in which I used my first baseball glove to symbolize childhood innocence and my love for my father, who had been dead for almost 20 years. Then I read a paragraph from “Catcher in the Rye” in which Holden talks about his dead brother’s baseball mitt.
Three months later, I stood in front of a classroom of ninth graders in a Washington Heights school. I finally had a career, one I could love.
After my first week, I took a walk down the Upper West Side to meet a friend for dinner. I passed by the martini bar where the L.A. woman and I drank apple martinis. I went in. In an indirect way, my life had changed because of that drink, and I wanted to make a symbolic toast to her. It was also an act of self-pity.
The bartender was the same guy from that weekend. I asked if he remembered me. He said he didn’t. I told him we were the only ones there and had danced to the Bee Gees. He said that people danced in there all the time, that they got engaged — he’d seen everything.
I ordered an apple martini and said I was celebrating becoming a teacher.
“What do you teach?” the woman next to me asked. And for the second time, an apple martini changed my life, because I’ve been married to her for 13 years.
Sometimes, when I sit on the stoop in front of my house in the suburbs and watch my two young boys play on the lawn, I think about the crazy series of events that occurred when I went back to that martini bar to lament a woman who had predicted that I would be married before we met again.
I never displayed the love-addict tendencies in the initial relationship with my future wife. Maybe it was because I had found a career I loved. One thing I do know: It helped that she liked bald guys.
Peter DeMarco, a writer in Ridgewood, N.J., teaches at a public high school in Washington Heights.
The Peril of Not Dying for Love
SEPT. 10, 2015
Credit Brian Rea
Modern Love
By CLAIRE JIA
High school Friday nights for my sister and me meant romantic comedies, trading boy secrets in our basement and playing a game called, “What Would You Do for Love?”
Popular questions included: “Would you give up your career for love?” “Would you eat a scorpion for love?” “Cut off your thumb?” “Jump in front of a car?”
“But I would die,” I’d protest.
“So,” she would say, “would you die for love?”
In the movies, people always did dramatic things for love: ditching their careers, donating organs or giving up their lives.
We watched Jack sink to his death in the icy Atlantic so Rose could stay afloat on the raft, and we cried when Harry ran through New York City to declare his love for Sally. We binge-watched Asian serial dramas, where the girl either has leukemia or is poor, and some rich boy (against all odds) falls in love with her.
I learned everything about love from movies. Love had a sexy soundtrack. Love was forever. Love almost always involved rain, stubborn parents and irrevocable passionate sacrifice.
Growing up, I wanted that sort of big love. My favorite romantic formula was the best-friends-falling-in-love pattern, à la Chandler and Monica in “Friends” or Ron and Hermione in “Harry Potter.”
In my dream, we would know each other for about three years. I would confide in him about my crushes. We would drink craft beer on rooftops at 2 a.m., screaming crude things at passers-by. Then one day I’d start dating someone totally wrong for me.
He would try to act normal and shake it off, because he was happy for me. But he would become distant and I’d be too obsessed with my Hugh Jackman look-alike boyfriend to notice.
Suddenly, I would fall ill with a cancer of some sort, and my friend would anonymously donate his organ to me. I would wake up in the hospital with him by my side and realize it was him I loved all along. Then he would kiss me, we’d have a trendy outdoor wedding and raise our 2.1 children in a Brooklyn brownstone.
My ABC Family Fantasy would have been harmless if I had realized real life isn’t like that.
I met the guy who would become the subject of this fantasy in the fall of my freshman year of college. I was out at a party, my key-card lanyard roped around my neck like a purity ring, when I bumped into someone I recognized from my floor. He pointed at me and said, “You’re Claire, right?”
Wary, I asked how he knew my name.
“I saw your door sign,” he said, blushing. “I scoped everyone out on the floor. Was that creepy?”
“Very,” I said, smirking, though I had done the same thing.
He was funny, attractive (in an approachable way) and soon was one of my closest friends. I mocked his Radiohead obsession; he made fun of my affinity for Top 40 music.
One winter night we were sitting on his bed at 4 a.m. talking about childhood insecurities when I realized this was it: He was the best friend I had been waiting to fall in love with.
Soon I became the narrator of my own romantic comedy. We spent spring break together, and on the five-hour bus ride from Boston to New York he asked me, in a nostalgic throwback to high school, to go to Spring Formal with him. He described the art studio his mother had back home. As we walked through Chinatown, he held my hand — not in a cheesy way, but because he wanted to make sure I was safe.
In my mind, I checked off the boxes (Cute ask-out? Talking about his family? Protective body contact? Check, check, check). A month later, we had our first kiss.
These memories fit my falling-in-love-with-my-best-friend story so perfectly that I ignored many moments of discomfort: our clammy hands and his rambling texts about “exciting” finance internships. For the story, I pretended that I liked kissing him, though I later described our make-out sessions to friends as being “like two co-workers shaking hands, but less intense.”
One evening during finals, it rained. “I’ve always wanted to be kissed in the rain,” I thought and went to get him. When I grabbed his hand and told him what I wanted to do, he replied, abruptly, “I don’t think there’s a spark between us.”
I didn’t know how to respond. “Cool,” I finally said, shrugging. “We’re better as friends, anyway.”
“Yeah,” he said with a grin. Then, putting on his headphones, he said he needed to study for his exam, so could I close the door behind me?
I stood in the hallway in my pajamas, unsure of how to feel. My friends were hanging out in the common room, unaware of the tragedy that had just occurred. Simply going back to my room to work on my Foucault essay didn’t seem the right response to this romantic Armageddon.
When Allie and Noah broke up in “The Notebook,” there was door slamming, hurled insults and crying. It seemed to me I needed to do something similar, so I ran out into the rain, shoeless, and screamed into the night. That’s what people do when they lose love, isn’t it? Scream? Or at least cry? But for me, the tears didn’t come. I just felt cold and wet and stupid. And I realized I had forgotten my keys.
Three months later, when we came back to school in the fall, I couldn’t put a finger on what it was that gnawed at me. He didn’t completely ignore me. He didn’t have sex with my roommate. He didn’t delete my number. We just didn’t see each other as much because we didn’t live in the same building anymore. I couldn’t even be mad at him. I felt empty, needy and, above all, bored.
If I couldn’t have my Chandler-Monica fantasy, I would take the Shakespearean tragedy instead. As the autumn months dragged on, I turned to downing wine and writing dark love poetry. Until I finally found myself lying face up in a pile of leaves on a biting October day, wearing the same shirt for the third day in a row, hoping someone would see me. As I lay there feeling dirty and invisible, I realized the saddest part: I never loved him in the first place.
I suppose I had known this all along, but for the story I had tried to love him. And after our breakup, I felt sad and lonely. But above all, I felt disappointment — a simple disappointment that I couldn’t have love. I chalked up all these emotions to heartbreak, because heartbreak is so much sexier than disappointment.
As I dated more, I learned that big love and big heartbreak come seldom. I resisted online dating because I didn’t think “I liked his profile picture” was a good story. Anonymously giving your kidney to your dying friend? That was a good story.
I thought the high-volume, quick-gratification nature of online dating cheapened the sanctity of romance. But having already failed in my quest for the perfect love story, I decided to give love a try in the least romantic way possible. As the Tinder app downloaded onto my phone, I silently mourned my coveted great love.
I met a guy for coffee, another for drinks. No one was perfect. No one was a total loser. I didn’t kiss any of them in the rain, but neither did I ever throw my drink in a date’s face. My life became a routine of swipe, swipe, message, date, awkward hookup, with a bottle of wine to finish the night.
It wasn’t heartbreak that became draining, but the lack of it.
I have been told so many times what love should look like that I am unsure what love even is anymore. If it doesn’t look like midnight kisses with my best friend, and it doesn’t look like a booty call from a Tinder match, what is it?
Dating more has certainly made my outlook on love a little less precious. I know that in real life, few people ever jump in front of a car, cut off their thumbs or eat scorpions for love, if they ever did. And rarely do people get a chance at big sacrificial displays in the form of a donated body organ.
We’re told love isn’t love until he’s begging on his knees, and that heartbreak isn’t heartbreak until you’ve lost your mind. We think we want love, but we’ve rarely seen it, because love is a boundless unknown that no romantic stereotype can capture.
Movies promise us blissful forevers or crushing sorrow, but most of the time, love is neither. Maybe it’s just two people who tolerate each other. Maybe it’s a mutual right swipe. What would I do for love? I’ll let you know when I actually find it.
Claire Jia is a recent graduate of Amherst College.
A Millennial’s Guide to Kissing
AUG. 6, 2015
Credit Brian Rea
Modern Love
By EMMA COURT
When a total stranger kissed me under the artificial lights of an airplane cabin somewhere above international waters, my first thought was of the Orthodox woman sitting to my left.
I hoped she was asleep. It was a 12-hour flight from Tel Aviv to Newark, and I wanted to nap too, but how could I now?
The kiss, coming out of nowhere, had turned me into the heroine of a bad romance novel: heart fluttering, weak-kneed, every nerve electrified. Those blue fleece blankets had never been so sexy.
It was an overnight flight, and I had already crunched the simple calculus: If I slept, I’d be over the seven-hour time difference by the time we landed and ready to hop back into a new semester at college. My highest hope for the trip, besides hours of sleep, had been that they would serve hummus at the in-flight dinner.
My stranger and I were returning from Birthright Israel trips with groups from our respective universities. Birthright Israel is a free 10-day trip to Israel for young Jewish-Americans, and I had wanted to go before I graduated. Last winter, before my final semester of college, I finally had.
Because there are so many young people on Birthright Israel trips, they’re often mocked as an attempt to spark a connection to Israel through the bedroom — and plenty of that had happened on my trip. But it hadn’t happened to me until that moment.
Spoiling the perfect narrative of two strangers meeting on an airplane, I admit that we had met before, just once, briefly, when I bumped into a friend from high school during a stop in Jerusalem.
One of her friends had been cute, I had remembered. And now here he was behind me as we boarded the airplane, then bending his tall frame into the aisle seat next to me. As he lifted his backpack into the overhead compartment, I marveled at my luck.
Between us sprang the kind of instant intimacy fostered by open personalities in tight quarters. We spoke in spurts about the gossip on our trips and what we had done during the days spent in Israel. We flirted. We kissed that first time. Then we kissed again.
Splitting a pair of headphones, we listened to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Taylor Swift. We slept a little, poorly.
Born and raised in New York City, I found his life as a not-so-Jewish boy in North Carolina foreign and dazzling. He and his friends did things like take long hiking trips and, in preparation, dehydrate their food.
I liked how easy he was, how ready to talk. I liked his laugh and his dark eyes. He knew how to figure out where rainbows would appear in the sky and told me about the “Door to Hell” in Turkmenistan, a crater of natural gas that’s been on fire for more than 30 years.
It seemed torn from the back of a Nicholas Sparks paperback: A Southern science major from a small liberal arts school and a Northern humanities major from a huge pre-professional university meet in the skies over the Mediterranean. The heat between them is palpable.
But less romantic details persisted: I was a senior, about to start my second semester, with plans to head to Dallas after graduation. He was a sophomore, with the swaddling comfort of knowing where he’d be for the next few years.
But it didn’t matter anyway, did it? In 12 hours, we’d be back on paths that led us in opposite directions. This meeting was just a romantic interlude from our real lives. And if it did mean anything, we were college students; we knew how to pretend it didn’t.
On the plane, the lights came back on and the breakfast cart appeared. Reality set in as we sipped orange juice from tin-foil-covered cups and, for the first time, had little to say to each other. During the bumpy landing, he distracted me by talking about famous airplane crashes.
And then with a final, jarring thump, we were back on the ground. As we gathered our belongings from what had been our temporary home, I wondered what would happen next.
We bought tickets at the train terminal, lingering on the automated buttons. After, as we were about to board trains headed in different directions, we stared at each other. He rested one arm on his rolling suitcase, bewilderment in his dark eyes.
I hugged him a brisk no-nonsense goodbye. We didn’t exchange numbers.
“Bye,” he shouted down the stairs at my back. “See you never.”
I couldn’t tell if he was serious or joking. Even embracing the more positive of the possibilities, it still stung.
And that should have been it: a story I told, giggling, to friends until the details faded, and he was just a boy whose name I didn’t remember. But I saw his name on my Facebook News Feed in a batch of photos our mutual friend had uploaded, and I couldn’t resist.
I clicked “Add Friend.” And one day, he messaged me.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” I typed back. “How’s life?”
It went like this for days. But talking to him made me feel like a time traveler, spliced between the snowy paths of my campus and the darkened airplane we had shared. I was sitting in class or at meetings at the local campus cafe, doing my readings in the library, and then a message on my screen would tug me back. I didn’t like the way it upset my balance, how far away and powerless it made me feel.
There was also a girl at his school lurking in the background of his messages. Was he trying to make me jealous? Was he just not thinking clearly?
Mass media has a fascination with hookup culture among people around my age (21) meriting in-depth investigations and contentious opining about what it all means. But they often miss a simple fact: There’s nothing particularly new about trying to avoid getting hurt.
It’s just that my generation has turned this avoidance into a science, perfecting the separation of the physical from the emotional. We truncate whenever possible: texting over calling, meeting over apps rather than in person. We leave in the early morning without saying goodbye. Being casual is cooler than intimacy and vulnerability. Or so we think.
Having the last word was once a sign of one’s wit and smarts. It meant that your comment had gravitas and staying power. But today, having the last word is the ultimate in weakness: It means being the person who doesn’t merit an answer. Better to leave them hanging than risk the same happening to you. Keep it shallow so your heart isn’t on the line.
Being aware of all this does not grant immunity from its effects.
One night, my roommate’s hookup rolled over in the dark and asked her in a half-murmur, “Is this a special thing?”
Confused, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, she asked him to repeat himself. She wasn’t certain she had heard him correctly.
“Never mind,” he said.
Later, she worried she had missed a crucial moment, one she would never get back. But if she had misunderstood, she risked showing her hand by revealing that she wanted him to stick around in the morning. It was too scary a prospect, so she never said anything.
Was my airplane interlude a special thing? Would things have been different if one of us had had the courage to say something other than goodbye before heading to our trains?
On the platform, walking away from him, I had decided that the whole affair was just one of many half-formed romantic liaisons that trail you in your youth. But maybe that attitude was also the problem.
He and I had met on an airplane, but we were headed to different destinations, so our encounter was charged with the impossibility of things going anywhere. At the time, I had had an inexplicable comfort level with it all. I only realized later why it had been such an oddly familiar feeling: My generation treats every liaison as if it is happening on an airplane, as if we have only that one night and there is no tomorrow.
Our story wasn’t so different, after all.
I don’t know what else could have happened. But I wonder what we collectively lose as we try so hard not to care. We pretend that it doesn’t matter, that we have time, that because we are young we are invulnerable.
He and I don’t communicate anymore; he moved on, and so did I. But in my head, I go back to that train platform. I turn to him, say goodbye. And then, recalling his parting words, I say them right back: “See you never.”
Emma Court recently graduated from Cornell.
The 36 Questions: An Answer to Their Prayers?
FEB. 13, 2015
Credit Brian Rea
Modern Love
By DANIEL JONES
Last month, a few days before Mandy Len Catron’s essay “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This” appeared in Modern Love, she aired some concerns about the coming exposure on her blog, writing that while a few hundred people may see one of her blog posts, thousands would see this column.
She underestimated by about 8 million.
In the essay, Ms. Catron told of how she found love by replicating a 20-year-old experiment by the psychologist Arthur Aron that involved two strangers asking each other 36 increasingly personal questions followed by a four-minute staring session to see if doing so would lead to intimacy and love. For Ms. Catron and the man she barely knew, the experiment worked.
Readers found this combination of romance and science (with a happy ending) irresistible. Ms. Catron’s story went viral, with couples across the country and around the globe trying the questions themselves.
The New Yorker and Dame magazine spoofed the experiment with 36 questions about how to fall out of love.
One man even posed the questions to his disengaged cat in a YouTube video, which amassed nearly 40,000 views.
A ticketed singles event in Manhattan drew 70 hopefuls who paid $40 each to be paired up and guided through the experiment.
The notion of falling in love from a quiz may sound like a gimmick, but the broad resonance of Dr. Aron’s 36 questions may be partly explained by the fact that there is nothing gimmicky about them. In this age of Tinder and self-curated dating profiles, where image and first impressions hold sway, these questions go deep.
But as Dr. Aron cautions, this isn’t an experiment that can be easily repeated with a series of romantic prospects, because you risk having canned answers if you keep using the same questions.
Since the essay appeared, we have been receiving reports from strangers and longtime couples who have tried the quiz, often armed with one of several quickly created apps featuring the quiz (The New York Times, in consultation with Dr. Aron, has created one as well, available atnytimes.com/36questions).
Two weeks after her essay appeared, Ms. Catron was still trying to adjust to what it had wrought. She and her boyfriend were out at a pizza parlor when he took out his phone and started typing. She assumed he was texting someone, but he slid the phone across to her. It read: “the couple next to us is doing the 36 questions.”
Sure enough, they were. In that moment, the full impact of her article finally hit home.
With Valentine’s Day upon us, we’d like to share a sampling of the stories we heard.
Daniel Jones is the editor of Modern Love and author of “Love Illuminated: Exploring Life’s Most Mystifying Subject (With the Help of 50,000 Strangers).”
Source: www.nytimes.com
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