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To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This
- empressplay 11y agoI met my partner on the Internet, and we spent two months (before I could afford to fly to Australia) talking over video-chat and we talked about everything, nothing was off limits, all the while just staring at each other, because it would be rude to do otherwise. We've been together now almost ten years.
- irremediable 11y agoRomantic story. :) I've always been surprised by people falling in love online, but maybe that's part of how it happens -- a situation that encourages eye contact and questioning.
- crusso 11y agoThe author tries to reproduce the falling-in-love experiment of psychologist Arthur Aron, involving a series of intimate questions and staring into each others' eyes. The end result? They fell in love. Despite that, her conclusion was: Love didn’t happen to us. We’re in love because we each made the choice to be.
- mankyd 11y agoThat seems like a correct conclusion. They chose to try it out. It didn't just "happen".
- joslin01 11y agoI'm confused. What didn't "just happen"? 1 - The love 2 - Them trying to fall in love
- Jtsummers 11y agoThe love didn't "just happen." They didn't wake up one day in their separate homes and think, "I'm in love with him/her." (Which, of course, can and does happen.) They went into it deliberately.
- joslin01 11y agoI'm not disagreeing, but the analogy I would counter with is that a person can control how much they drink in order to feel drunk, but that person can never control the drunken feeling. Similarly, a person may meet lots of potential partners and might even fall for many of them, but this person will never be able to control the love feeling. To the extent that they believe they can is self-deception. Yet they can always choose to walk away from the person just like a person can choose to stop drinking.
- dgreensp 11y agoIt's intellectually dishonest and detracts enormously from the quality of the article. You can see the author taking her unique experience and awkwardly shoving it into some familiar narrative. I'm also skeptical that her thoughts and emotions while eye-gazing (with a man she has a crush on) were entirely about how round eyeballs generally are, based on the other reports of eye-gazing I've heard (including one firsthand from an acquaintance). I'm guessing the author is either out of touch with her emotions or is applying the same politically-correct white-washing here as she did to her conclusion.
- themartorana 11y agoWow. That's a lot of judgements and assumptions about a person's character and thoughts - considering you've probably never met this person before, and have only read this singular article.
- chris_wot 11y agoThat's a lot of guessing and assuming you are doing. How... scientific.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoShe also mentions that the experiment was compromised. They weren't strangers (as in the original experiment). They chose one another to try the experiment with. So she was correct in that way.
- nilkn 11y agoI don't fully understand your criticism. The thrust of this article is that, thanks to Dr. Aron's technique, it's more or less possible to fall in love with anyone. Therefore, who you fall in love with comes down to a matter of choice rather than chance. Of course, this is predicated on the validity of the technique.
- logfromblammo 11y agoSurely, the technique could be tested more rigorously.... Select a pair randomly. Put the pair into a room with one two-seat bench and one stool, with one table accessible from both, and at least one obvious video camera. Ask the participants to complete a survey, captioning 20 photographs with multiple-choice descriptions of smells. The subjects are asked to place "all metal objects" into lockers. Escort the pair to the "treatment room", immobilize their heads in a plastic frame, such that their faces are 5 cm apart, and stick a device up their noses that sprays a thin vaporizer mist. Hands and feet would be restrained, such that each person would be unable to touch the misting device. The experiment assistant leaves the room and causes a "room is being locked" sound to be heard inside. The lighting in the room would be set to 555nm green, the audio would play a quiet "electrical equipment" hum, and the pair would be left alone with a visible countdown clock for exactly 30 minutes, with beep tones sounding at 0:20:00, 0:25:00, 0:29:00, 0:29:15, 0:29:30, 0:29:45, 0:30:00. At 0:30:00, the lighting returns to normal, and a "room is being unlocked" sound is heard before the door opens. The control group gets a misting of water droplets. The experimental group gets oxytocin and vasopressin. Then the experiment assistant takes them out of the apparatus and returns them to the other room, where they are asked to repeat the image captioning task. The objective experimental data will examine whether a pair that elects to use the stool before the treatment will share the bench afterward, and whether the participants exchange any contact information during the debriefing period. I think it's important to not inform the subjects that the experimenter is trying to make them fall in love, because expectations do crazy things to psych experiment results.
- klenwell 11y agoThe next time someone asks me what love means to me, this is going to be my answer.
- StavrosK 11y agoThat's not what I got. She does say: > 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. In that light, the "we made the choice to be" is, in part, because they chose to ask the questions.
- crusso 11y agoRead the last 3 paragraphs again. She's saying that performing the experiment created a space for intimacy but that she and her partner ultimately chose to be in love. She's acknowledging some of the effect, but trying to give herself some wiggle room that ultimately she was in control. Seemed like a bit of denial to me that her love was fundamentally so formulaic.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jemfinch 11y ago> Love didn’t happen to us. We’re in love because we each made the choice to be. Yes, because she chose to try to reproduce the experiment. That's her point. She didn't just have to wait for it to happen: she chose to see if she could replicate it, and she did replicate it.
- pella 11y agoold comments: (352 days ago ) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8866933 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8866933
- imsdal 11y agoThe link posted by ada1981 in that thread leads to an advertising page.
- nanoojaboo 11y agoI saw two (lesbian) women in a Starbucks doing this quiz with each other (and videotaped it). Really awkward
- pcunite 11y agoWhile I think you can fall in love with anyone, to actually stay in love you'll need to follow the concepts found in books like "The Five Love Languages" and "His Needs, Her Needs".
- zyrthofar 11y agoI love "The Five Love Languages". It helped me understand why my past relationships had failed, that neither them nor me were at fault. We just didn't speak the other's language.
- ourmandave 11y agoStrange that I finished reading your comment and was thinking you had exactly 5 past relationships that didn't work out. Edit: Down votes for an observation about myself? Whatev...
- paublyrne 11y agoI was in a relationship with a Spanish native speaker and had the same problem.
- matwood 11y agoLook someone in the eyes, get them to talk about themselves, and they will most of the time like you. Not really a secret, but also not always easy to do. And, for many people it takes real effort.
- Floady 11y agoI do believe in the science behind this to some degree. But for the largest part this is common sense, the questions are so personal that you connect to someone. The problem today is that everyone is afraid to expose themselves, or puts up a facade they think society wants to see, rather than talking to each other about real feelings and real stuff, no matter how odd, weird or silly.
- Majestic121 11y agoWell, science is also about explaining common sense. It is common sense that if you drop an apple, it will fall down toward earth. But the theory of gravity helped us put words on this common sense, and explain it better.
- hamhamed 11y agoWhat about an app to un-fall in love?
- chris_wot 11y agoThat's like needing an app to tell you that you are using an electronic device.
- hamhamed 11y agoim sure there's a big market for ppl who want to get over someone. maybe the solution is to get someone new..or maybe we need an app to tell us that, and marketed towards ppl who broke up recently
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoIf you can fall in love with anyone, it would pay off to be wise whom you chose to fall in love with...
- 10dpd 11y agoThis always comes up around Valentines Day so I created http://www.fallinloveapp.com http://www.fallinloveapp.com
- kilroy123 11y agoThank you! I've been looking for this for a while. Saw this last year.
- logicallee 11y agopretty good, thanks. (small bug: your timer has a pause button, but there's no way to unpause it - after pausing, clicking "play" resets the timer to 4 minutes unexpectedly (since there's an actual reset button) before continuing, instead of continuing where paused as expected - clicking pause a second time doesn't unpause either. chrome.)
- bitsoda 11y agoGreat job, this is really well-done. Small quibble: the link to the Spanish version of the web app links to the Italian version.
- justinhj 11y agoIt's an interesting article as is, but these two people were already in each others circles and mutually attracted to each other. A blind date would be a better test.
- adamredwoods 11y agoThat's what I was thinking, too. If someone wants to apply this test on their own, they have to choose the partner. So in my opinion, they're already half-way there since there is some sort of attraction.
- Shadow6363 11y agoFound this kind of interesting, but I'm having a hard time understanding the procedure. Do both people ask each other every question or does person A ask question 1, person B asks question 2, and so on and so forth?
- ericschmidt 11y agoThe definition of "love" is so vague that it can mean almost anything to anyone. That's why "love" is popular as a concept among homo sapiens – because everyone has their own personal definition of it. It's also why articles (& studies) like this are fundamentally misguided. Theyre jumping right ahead into forming conclusions, but they haven't even defined their terms. ...which is probably because their chosen terms are literally impossible to define.
- melicerte 11y agoThere is a TED talk about this study[1], probably an interesting addition to the article. Mandy Len Catron speech starts from this study. [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/mandy_len_catron_falling_in_love_is_the_easy_part?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/mandy_len_catron_falling_in_love_i...
- apalmer 11y agoI think the process kind of misses the whole point. Once two people have made the decision to fall in love with each other it is 'relatively' easy. The whole 'roadblocks' that are in place that this process overcomes are completely rational. Its not difficult at all to fall in love, it is difficult to find someone who you 'should' fall in love with.
- 1024core 11y agoFalling in love is not the problem. Getting that cute girl to fall in love with _me_ is the problem. :)
- brandtg 11y agoLeave it to HN to over-analyze a romantic anecdote...