The 36 questions to fall in love are a set of increasingly personal questions designed to create closeness between two people quickly. They come from a 1997 study by psychologist Arthur Aron and colleagues, formally titled “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness.” Two strangers took turns answering all 36, then stared into each other’s eyes for four minutes. Many reported feeling unusually close; one pair in a later New York Times account married.
Here’s how the questions are structured, why they work, and how couples use them before a wedding.
Why They Work: Escalating Self-Disclosure
The mechanism is reciprocal, escalating vulnerability. The questions are split into three sets, each more personal than the last. You and your partner alternate answering, so you’re both disclosing at the same rate — neither person is exposed alone. This is the key design feature: disclosure that isn’t reciprocated feels like oversharing and creates distance, but disclosure that’s matched step for step builds trust.
- Set I — light and getting-acquainted: “Would you like to be famous? In what way?” “What would constitute a perfect day for you?”
- Set II — values, memory, and self-image: “What is your most treasured memory?” “What does friendship mean to you?”
- Set III — the deepest: “When did you last cry in front of another person?” “Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how they might handle it.”
The final instruction — four minutes of sustained eye contact — is a separate closeness-generating step. Eye contact at that length is intense; done deliberately with a partner, it tends to feel connecting rather than awkward. Most couples find the first 30 seconds uncomfortable and the rest surprisingly calm.
We won’t reprint the full list here (it’s widely available and the experience is better without spoilers), but that’s the shape.
Do the 36 Questions Actually Work?
The honest answer: they reliably increase feelings of closeness in the moment, and studies have replicated that. They do not manufacture lasting love between incompatible people. What the exercise really does is compress weeks of gradual disclosure into an hour — useful for a new couple, and surprisingly revealing for a long-term one, because you almost always learn something you’d never asked.
Aron himself has said the questions are a tool for building closeness, not a love potion. A follow-up point researchers make: the effect fades if it’s a one-off. Couples who report lasting benefit tend to be the ones who treat it as the start of a habit — a standing “deep question over dinner” practice — rather than a single evening.
How Couples Use Them Before a Wedding
For an already-committed couple, the 36 questions work differently than they do for strangers. Used a few weeks or months before a wedding, they tend to surface:
- Values you assumed you shared but had never stated out loud.
- Family stories one partner knew and the other didn’t.
- Fears about the marriage that hadn’t had a safe container to be spoken in.
Couples do this over a bottle of wine the night before the rehearsal, on a long drive, or as a private ritual the week of the wedding. It’s the opposite of a checklist — there’s nothing to complete, just a conversation with a good structure.
A practical way to run it as a couple: don’t try to do all 36 in one sitting. Do Set I on one evening, Set II on another, Set III on a third, close together enough that the momentum carries. Save the eye-contact step for the end of Set III. If a question opens something big, stop and stay with it — finishing the list is not the point.
Who Created the 36 Questions?
Arthur Aron, a research psychologist who has spent his career studying how closeness forms between people, along with co-authors including Elaine Aron. The study was published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 1997. It re-entered popular culture in 2015 via Mandy Len Catron’s New York Times essay “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This.”
Get a love-and-marriage version of the exercise with the free Whispers of the 36 — a pull of questions and prompts drawn specifically for engaged couples, so the conversation lands on the marriage rather than on first-date territory.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the 36 questions that make people fall in love?
A set of 36 questions, in three escalating sets, from Arthur Aron’s 1997 closeness study. Two people alternate answering, moving from light topics to deeply personal ones, then hold four minutes of eye contact.
Do the 36 questions to fall in love actually work?
They reliably increase feelings of closeness in the moment, and this has been replicated in studies. They don’t create lasting love between incompatible people — they accelerate disclosure, which is only the start of a relationship.
How do the 36 questions build intimacy?
Through reciprocal, escalating self-disclosure: both people share at the same increasing depth, so vulnerability feels mutual and safe rather than one-sided. The sustained eye contact at the end adds a second closeness mechanism.
Who created the 36 questions (Dr. Arthur Aron)?
Yes — Dr. Arthur Aron and colleagues, published in 1997. It was popularized by a 2015 New York Times essay by Mandy Len Catron.
Can long-term couples do the 36 questions?
Yes, and it’s often more revealing for them than for strangers, because they’ll hit questions they never thought to ask each other in years together.
How long does it take to do all 36?
About 60–90 minutes if you do it in one sitting, though many couples spread it across three evenings by set. The four-minute eye-contact step is separate and comes at the very end.
Is it weird to do this with someone you’re already marrying?
No — it’s one of the more popular pre-wedding rituals precisely because it surfaces the things you assumed you’d both already covered. It tends to be tender rather than awkward when there’s already trust in place.
An Hour That’s Worth Having Before You Marry
The 36 questions don’t make love — they make disclosure. For an engaged couple, that hour tends to surface the things you assumed you both already knew and never actually said.
Try a version built for engaged couples with the free Whispers of the 36.
