36 questions and four minutes of eye contact should be enough to make two people fall in love. The study promised by a psychology professor. Our author wonders.
The light is dimmed, my excitement is great. I sit in a bar and stare at the lipstick rim of my wine glass. I've had double dates, blind dates, and sex dates, but I've never done anything like today. My nails tumble nervously on the counter as I try to remember what it's like to be in love. If everything goes according to plan, I will know it again in two hours.
I am not a romantic. For me, love is the logical consequence of chemical processes, intimacy and a lot of willingness to compromise. When it comes to love comedies and declarations of love, I feel uncomfortably touched, if at all. However, this defensive attitude means that I rarely get into situations in which the chemical processes just mentioned can even begin to work.
Psychological terror?
Natalie Imbruglia is frustrated with her 90s hit "Torn": "Illusion never changed / Into something real". The woman has apparently never heard of Arthur Aron. The 36-question catalog, which the professor of psychology compiled 23 years ago, is intended to create familiarity and then love between two people. Even between strangers. Automatically. Whether man wants or woman doesn't. Studies have shown that. I would have run away screaming before a romantic candlelight dinner with violin music and a shared noodle as the highlight of the evening. But scientifically based falling in love through forced familiarity? It's rational, it makes sense, I can believe in it!
Vincent knocks on the outside of the large pane of the bar and grins from ear to ear. To my great surprise, he immediately agreed to the experiment, which he would describe in the next few hours as "waltz of the soul" or overwhelmed as "psychological terror".
The get-to-know
Vincent and I met via a dating app and had three meetings, between which there were always several weeks without contact. Whether consciously or unconsciously, we have not yet focused on great love. But today we are challenging Cupid. We sit down at a table in the middle of the room, light the candle, let our glasses clink and get to work. The Internet says that the entire experiment takes one to two hours. We have over five.
We're still having fun: Would you like to be famous? How would it be and how would you be? What is your perfect day like? When was the last time you sang for yourself? And when for someone else?
We slide highly motivated through the first block of questions. Every answer leads to questions, we could fill the evening well with the first twelve questions. In each block, we should either compliment each other or find common ground, which makes it even easier to open up. We still have fun and no problems in sharing unpleasant truths with each other. We feel good, laugh a lot and mostly agree. "Who wants to run the rest of their lives with the spirit of their 30-year-old self?" He asks. "I think this question is only designed to make us feel connected," I say. "I think the whole experiment is designed for that," he says with a grin.
At the latest when asked what we would change about our own upbringing, we are surprised to find that there are some parallels in our lives. We were friendly before, this burgeoning one "We against the rest" feeling is new, however. More romantic people would now look each other deeply in the eyes and lose themselves in the hope of great love – we, on the other hand, burst out laughing out loud. I wonder if this is still the defense mechanism of the attachment shy or already the friend zone?
It is getting serious. Imagine waking up with a new trait or ability tomorrow. Which would you like to have? What was the worst moment in your life? Would you change your lifestyle if you knew you were going to die in a year?
Too much information?
It's getting tiring. Vincent reaches his limits when he is supposed to summarize his life story in four minutes. After 20 minutes he gives up hair-raising. I feel the same way when I talk about my complex ex relationship. I speak faster and faster, stumble over my thoughts and fear that I will reveal too much without being able to really explain myself. "Maybe that was a mistake," I whisper to myself while he's in the loo. When he comes back, he takes up the topic again: It reminds him of his ex-girlfriend. Apparently we also have similarities in relationship patterns.
We prefer to switch to water knowing that there are still some challenges ahead. We talk about difficult relationships with our mothers, celebrate friendships in our lives, tell us about our greatest fears and hopes. "If this continues, then you are not in love afterwards, but have to get together with the person because they simply know too much," states Vincent after the second block. When we arrive at the question of what we would want to know from a fortune teller, we answer the same thing: whether we will find true love. Surprise. It was not clear to me that he longed for it at all.
Date or therapy session?
The grand finale: When was the last time you cried? When was the last time in front of someone else? Which family member's death would be the worst for you? What should you know about yourself in a close friendship?
In the third block of questions we are immersed in the world of each other as in a series after four hours of binge watching. The empty bar, which was a backdrop for sexy fantasies a few hours ago, has now reached the aura of a therapy practice. We make unspoken connections between the individual stories and can understand emotions much better. When we arrived at the most embarrassing moments in our lives, all the walls fell. Vincent tells four.
For me, the last task is the biggest challenge: After both have answered all 36 questions, we should look each other in the eye for four minutes. I queue up at the dentist like a little kid. "No! Not yet! I can't!" As soon as the timer runs out, I giggle and squirm with discomfort, then I slowly begin to accept my fate. The stare becomes a let-down. Interesting. Somehow beautiful, I think in surprise. The timer beeps. Four minutes are up and yet felt like one.
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