The 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.
It'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.
Wow. 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.
I 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.
Surely, 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.
I could say the same about a few psych experiments that were actually conducted. The Stanford prison experiment [0] seems rather awful, and it actually got released as a thriller this year [1].
But this particular one seems to be much like Clockwork Orange and Human Centipede, staring into one another's eyes and speaking candidly.
Not to be overly pedantic, but it's also predicated on a person's understanding of love (in the romantic sense). For example, if one understands love to be significant emotional attraction, then this type of exercise seems likely to produce it. However, if emotional attraction is necessary but not sufficient, (e.g., a person can't/won't romantically love another without a shared worldview) this exercise will only identify potential friends.
Also, to a great extent I agree that love is a choice, but it doesn't strictly follow that if it's possible to love anyone, then love must be a choice. It may also be possible that we can fall in love with anyone by chance, but the chances for a love-producing circumstance are small, so romantic love is infrequent (somewhere between zero to a handful of times per lifetime). On this view, Dr Aron only identified a mechanism for increasing the probability of romance.
For the curious, the idea that love (a belief, to an extent) is a choice falls under a hotly disputed umbrella position called "Doxastic Voluntarism" [1].
> 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.
Read 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.
The 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.
I'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.
> 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.
She 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.
I 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.
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.
I 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.
pretty 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.)
Look 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.
I 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.
Well, 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.
While 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".
I 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.
It'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.
That'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.
Found 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?
