Can Gazing Into Someone's Eyes for 4 Minutes Make You Fall in Love?

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A few weeks ago, an interesting article from the New York Times popped up in my Facebook feed: “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This.” I wasn’t looking for love because I am already married, but the title and excerpt were compelling enough for a matchmaker, like me, to click on the link.

In this article, the author, Mandy Len Cotran, talks about how she fell in love by attempting to copy an experiment by psychologist Arthur Aron. Twenty years ago, Aron was successful in making two strangers fall in love by having them ask and answer 36 questions designed to create intimacy. This was followed by four minutes of them gazing into each other’s eyes.

In her article, Cotran describes the experiment like this: “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.”

As I read her story, I kept thinking, “Aron’s experiment sounds like what CatholicMatch has been doing successfully for years.”

Like the experiment, the format of CatholicMatch encourages couples to ask questions that go beyond small talk and quickly establish intimacy. That’s why there are so many Success Stories where the couple got married soon after meeting on the site.

The Questions

Dr. Aron’s questions begin light-heartedly: “Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?”

After a dozen questions of this nature, he ups the ante and asks deeper questions such as, “If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?”

Then he poses even more serious questions including, “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?”

Cotran writes: “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.”

Four Whole Minutes

The part of the experiment where the subjects are supposed to stare into one another eyes for four minutes is the part that makes me giggle nervously. I could gaze into the eyes of my nursing babies for this duration, but another adult of the opposite sex. Awkward.

Cotran writes how exhilarating the experience was for her: “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 think that this experiment would be good for married folks to do. After more than 10 years of marriage—and not enough dates nights because we both hate to leave our kids—I would seriously like to rekindle the intimacy with my husband and ask him all of these questions without interruptions from our little kids.

We’re planning a trip to Greece, so this will be the perfect opportunity to do this without an audience. Can you imagine what kind of questions we would get from our nine, six, and four-year-old  children if they saw us gazing into each other's eyes for four minutes?

Love is Choice

The last part of this article that really caught my attention is that someone besides the Church is reminding us that love is a choice and not just warm fuzzy feelings. The author finishes with these thoughts on love:

“Most of us think about love as something that happens to us. We fall. We get crushed. …[But] Arthur Aron’s study taught me that it’s possible—simple, even—to generate trust and intimacy, the feelings love needs to thrive. … Love didn’t happen to us. We’re in love because we each made the choice to be.”

Just maybe finding a spouse has been made more complicated then it needs to be.

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