The questions are everywhere now. They show up on first dates and in magazine columns and on laminated cards at dinner parties. Someone usually frames them as a secret potion, an ancient code: answer these thirty-six questions with a stranger, and you might fall in love.

Many of us yearn for such a recipe, a secret set of life instructions that might produce, on demand, our desired outcome.

But the study that gave us these 36 questions was not about love, at least not the way it’s been marketed to us.

The question behind it all was this: can intimacy be created on purpose, between strangers, in a laboratory?

At the time, the early 90s, this ran against a deeply held assumption. Namely that closeness is organic, unpredictable, and grows over time. You meet, you talk, you circle each other. You disclose a little, then a little more. Trust accumulates in the space between you, drawing you inevitably closer until you sense a gravitational force holding you two alone together, in orbit.

Arthur Aron, a social psychologist in his mid-forties at Stony Brook University in New York, wondered if the process was less mysterious than it felt.

Born in 1945, Aron came of age intellectually at UC Berkeley, where he studied psychology and philosophy. Around 1967, he fell intensely in love with a fellow graduate student named Elaine Spaulding. The experience was so profound, he wanted to read research on how it happened, but he found almost none. A social psychology student, he decided to take it on.

He and Elaine married, and devoted their professional lives to studying the thing that happened to them.

By the early 1990s, Aron was working on a theory he developed with Elaine called The Self Expansion Model, about what relationships actually do to the self. Their idea was that closeness functions as a form of expansion, that through intimate relationships, we absorb something of the other person: their perspectives, their resources, their way of being in the world. To love someone, in this view, is partly to become larger than you were before.

But a theory is not evidence, and the field had a problem: almost everything known about closeness had been learned by studying people who were already close. That meant researchers could observe what closeness looked like, but they couldn't study how it formed. They couldn't run an experiment on it. You can't randomly assign people who have known each other for ten years.

What the Arons wanted to know was whether closeness had a mechanism, did the slow accumulation of trust between two people followed recognizable patterns, and if it did, could those patterns be deliberately reproduced?

They set about designing a highly controlled study. But before proceeding, they needed to come up with a series of questions.

For that, they turned to Edward Melinat, a graduate student who, In 1991, wrote his dissertation on Intimacy. Melinat wondered whether a person's ability to say yes or no to emotional demands affected how intimate they felt with someone. To do that he needed a way to produce closeness between strangers in a lab. He came up with forty questions, left the subjects to work through them, and found they grew closer.

The Arons saw the potential in these questions, and stripped out the explicitly romantic scenarios, toned down provocative prompts and through trial and error reduced the set from forty to thirty-six.

They paired participants with strangers and gave each the list of questions, separated into three sets of increasing emotional intensity. The early questions were almost trivial: preferences, hypotheticals, light disclosures, but as participants moved through the sets, the tone shifted and deepened. They asked after memory, vulnerability, and the self-revelation usually reserved for long-term friendships.

The rules: Each person had to answer every question, and they must take turns. No one could dominate, monologue, deflect, withdraw or shutdown. The design was meant to enforce mutual disclosure, and the necessity of moving forward in tandem, bypassing the often uncontrolled asymmetry of ordinary conversation.

After the questions were asked and answered, the pairs were asked to sit in silence and maintain eye contact for four minutes. Sustained eye contact increases physiological arousal and intensifies the sense of being seen. This was a way of heightening emotional presence at the exact moment an interaction might otherwise dissipate.

What the Arons and their colleagues found wasn’t that people fell in love, but that they fell into connection. Compared to those engaged in small talk, participants reported markedly higher levels of closeness, a felt sense of knowing another, of having crossed, in under an hour, a threshold reserved for longer time durations.

In the very first pilot study, using an earlier version of the questions, one couple later married. The research team attended the wedding.

The paper they published about the study came out in 1997 in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin under the title "The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness." It remained, for nearly two decades, what it was meant to be: a contribution to the scientific literature, part of the Arons’ broader work on self-expansion and the mechanics of human intimacy.

Then, in 2015, the experiment left the lab, and took on a life of its own.