Falling in Love vs. Staying in Love

If you want to fall in love - even with a stranger - you can download an app and follow instructions: Ask each other 36 questions and then look into each other's eyes for 4 minutes of silence.

I'm serious! This article is about the backstory of this app. 

But can this love last?
Mandy Len Catron went viral with her story-telling of the experiment, but the idea wasn't originally hers. She found this study of Stony Brook university professor Arthur Aron. Here is his conclusion:

This ... is not a call to abandon the richness of real-world experience, particularly in the area of close relationships. Rather, it is an invitation to alternate ... correlational and experimental methods. In this way, work with naturally occurring relationships can be refined and sorted out through experimentally generated relationship experiences. At the same time, precise work with experimentally generated relationships can be inspired by and checked against the reality of relationships as they naturally occur in the world. In short, it is time for researchers of close relationships to find ways to welcome back our wayward friend, the true experiment.

Miss Catron took his idea and lived this experiment, then she wrote an Article for the New York Times; 7 months later she gave this talk for TED.

So if falling in love is a science; shouldn't staying in love be just as easy?

Obviously being in at one point in time will not last a lifetime unless the elements of intimacy which took place during the experiment are continued "until death do us part".

Let's pull out some of the essential elements of this experiment:

• Time spent exclusively with each other.
• Mutual interest given and received.
• A Face-to-face encounter without any demands or expectations.
• Smiling eye-to-eye contact.
• Questions that go beyond "What did you do today?" to a deeper "How are you? Who are you?"
• Sharing of what matters most - mutual vulnerability.

It may take effort and consistency, but the elements are fairly simple. Spouses who spend quality time every day on each other are the ones who remain deeply in love.

And if you get stuck, you might just think about downloading an app.