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Ivan Vendorov: This story alone that love has a formula has always stuck with me. I’m an engineer, a mathematician by training, and numbers and processes come easy to me.
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Whether you are currently in a relationship or not, many of us feel that there is something special about the person we have chosen as our romantic partner. I have. A partner cannot be anyone without supporting the idea of ”the one” or soulmate.
Over the next few days, we’ll explore what it means to find and be in love, starting with the fact that falling in love may be easier than you think.
I’m Sheila Love.what you are hearing Scientific Americanof science, quickThis week we dive into love and brains. First, we’ll start with the story behind the famous 36-question set. new york times.
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Love: The idea that the partner is “anyone”, but the work of 2015 new york timesA contemporary love column entitled “How To Fall In Love With Anyone” made such a splash. It claimed it was from a 1997 study that appeared to have led to at least one pair of strangers falling in love. they The relationship also ended.
Is there such a simple formula for love? Well, it turns out that these famous 36 questions have a different origin story than what many of us thought… they weren’t meant to build a romantic relationship. .
Ivan Vendrov, a software engineer now based in San Francisco, said: new york times Article first published.
Vendoroff: This story alone that love has a formula has always stuck with me. I’m an engineer, a mathematician by training, and numbers and processes come easy to me.
Love: This turned Ivan’s wheels.
Vendoroff: It was kind of funny to think that love could be inherently algorithmic, wasn’t it? If you meet strangers and go through this process, you are guaranteed to fall in love with them.
Love: When he started seeing someone, he thought about the question again.
Vendoroff: It was early in a romantic relationship. And I was really excited to learn more about my partner. .
Love: But Ivan wasn’t sure how much time he and his partner should spend on each question.
Vendoroff: Questions are often very broad and intimate. “Tell me your … life story”, “What would constitute a ‘perfect’ night for you?” What do you most regret not having spoken about?”
Love: These were the kinds of questions you could ask time do not reach the bottom of the
Vendoroff: In fact, what drove me to investigate was, “Well, how did they do this in the original study? What was the time limit? And that wasn’t anywhere in the original.” new york times It’s an article, so I read the paper.
Love: What Ivan found surprised him.
Vendoroff: The paper new york times The paper’s questions weren’t about love, they were about deepening interpersonal relationships.
Arthur Aron: We wanted to create something that could randomly assign people to be near or not near in the lab.
Love: I’m Arthur Aron, professor of psychology at Stony Brook University. He was one of the people responsible for this study, along with his wife Elaine. Aron confirms that…
To: The 36 questions are designed to create the right amount of intimacy between two people in a short amount of time.
Love: but …
To: It’s not the same as being in love. Love has another whole component of desire for deep connection. And in the case of romantic love, it usually involves sexuality and things like that.
Love: As you can imagine, Ivan found it quite surprising.
Vendoroff: When I realized this, I thought, “Wow, that’s crazy.” All these people have done this thing trying to find love. But really, it’s not about the process. The process is interpersonal.
Love: While reading Arthur’s paper, Ivan noticed a reference to earlier work from 1991. it was Created to encourage people to fall in love.
Vendoroff: I tried to find the question from the original research. They weren’t online anywhere. They were published at some conference, but are now defunct and have no trace.
Love: as people do, Ivan cold sent an email to an unknown Arthur asking a question.
Vendoroff: And yeah, I got a reply a few weeks later. And he said, “Yeah, I think there are some scans in the original question.” Well, a few weeks after that he sent me the scans and I shared them with the world….
Love: So he posted the whole story on Twitter.
The question previously posted by Ivan was from a 1991 paper by Edward D. Melinat. He is now his counselor for couples and was also co-author of a 1991 conference paper and his 1997 study.These first questions are later conformed The 36 well-known questions and the 1991 question are much more provocative.
Vendoroff: This includes role-playing asking your partner out on a date or pretending to tell your partner that you’re falling in love.
Love: Other notable questions and tasks from the 1991 paper include: Including his or her appearance, clothing, and his or her personality. It was in fact in the original experiment described in the 1991 paper. new york times— that two of the participants were married.
Ivan said he wasn’t too surprised that these prompts could lead to mutual attraction between two people. But he didn’t like questions and didn’t use them with his partner.
Vendoroff: I’m not sure why I feel like I’m trying too hard. Or I feel like you’re trying to hack my brain to believe something I don’t fully believe.
Love: Still, the 36 questions in the 1997 study Shown to be able to make strangers feel intimate with each other, 40 original prompts sparked romantic connections in at least one case. What is in
I wanted to know the differences and commonalities between both question sets. So I asked Arthur.
To: First of all, in the romantic version, people interacted for an hour and a half. Contains 36 questions. So they are quite different.
Love: As Ivan learned, romantic questions are, well, more romantic.
To: Romantic includes items such as imagining falling in love with that person for the first time, imagining telling that person for the first time, and acting like that.
Love: But what these series of questions have in common is that they both create a gradual increase in vulnerability between two people. Prompts start out neutral and slowly escalate until people get used to each other. Arthur says this causes some very important things to happen.
To: Some items focus on …letting [a] People know you like them.feeling liked by someone [has] Feeling that other people like you has a huge impact on both general and romantic intimacy.
Love: that I’ve found that just feeling that someone likes you is pretty powerful.
To: I did some research where I asked people to describe what happened when they fell in love. increase.
Love: Another important component of this “formula” is the feeling that you are similar to other people, whether they actually resemble you or not.
To: In most cases, similarity isn’t really that important in building a romantic relationship.
Love: now Many people use dating apps. Instead of participating in an old-fashioned courtship, individuals may be swiping and talking to dozens of people, I tell Arthur that in the world of mass dating he uses 36 or 40 questions I asked if it works too.
To: Doing it online with a person is almost as effective as doing it in person, especially if you have a video. But doing the same thing over and over, whether face-to-face or online, blurs the answer.
Love: Using too many questions to too many people can have a “dilution” effect.
To: It won’t have the same effect if the person you’re talking to feels like you’re kind of rotten and spilling things. It is to feel that you are reacting. If you’re talking about something really personal, it’s really important to feel the reaction. And its responsiveness has a big effect.
Love: Arthur still thinks these questions (a set of 36 or 40 items) are an effective way to get to know someone. And for couples, he suggests another, less-mentioned use.
To: In an ongoing relationship, doing this with a partner can be somewhat helpful.Such [that’s] It is recommended that people do it in separate couples.
Love: As for Ivan, he’s going to stick to getting to know people in an informal way.
Vendoroff: It feels pretty dangerous to me. And I think it’s better to fall in love more slowly and traditionally.
Love: He wants to stick with that feeling of finding that rare spark when you meet someone, even if it works for you if you stick to the mold.
Vendoroff: Personally, I feel it’s very important to have a story about why you fell in love with someone, and that that story is unique.In our society, we have so many choices. I think. See, you’re always one swipe away… [you’re] One minute from joining a dating app and seeing potential other people. Or people living in cities have so many dating apps, so many opportunities to meet, [so you feel] Like you really need a reason why your partner is special and why your story is special. And if the reason you’re with a partner is that you ran the algorithm, I might wonder what would happen if you ran this algorithm with someone else.
Love: In the next episode of “Love and Brains”…
Levine: I really experienced it as a revelation, a personal revelation. It really helped me understand all the different things that were going on with my failed relationship and breakup.
Love: We describe how people are thought to fall into patterns of either anxiety, avoidance, or security when responding to attachment styles, or romantic entanglements.
science fast Produced by Jeff Dervicio, Turika Bose and Kelso Harper.
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Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.
for Scientific Americanof science, quick, I’m Sheila Love.
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