#Staring at the sun smile series

Science tells us biology matters our pheromones and hormones do a lot of work behind the scenes.īut despite all this, I’ve begun to think love is a more pliable thing than we make it out to be.

It’s true you can’t choose who loves you, although I’ve spent years hoping otherwise, and you can’t create romantic feelings based on convenience alone. But I see now that the story isn’t about us it’s about what it means to bother to know someone, which is really a story about what it means to be known. If nothing else, I thought it would make a good story. I wondered what would come of our interaction. It assumes that what matters to my partner matters to me because we have at least three things in common, because we have close relationships with our mothers, and because he let me look at him. We get crushed.īut what I like about this study is how it assumes that love is an action.

Most of us think about love as something that happens to us. Already I was beginning to see our evening through the surreal and unreliable lens of retrospect. When the timer buzzed, I was surprised - and a little relieved. “Definitely less uncomfortable than the staring into each other’s eyes part would be.” Looking around the bar, I felt as if I had just woken up. We finished at midnight, taking far longer than the 90 minutes for the original study. I don’t know why we don’t go around thoughtfully complimenting one another all the time. It’s astounding, really, to hear what someone admires in you. It’s easy to see how the questions encourage what they call “self-expansion.” Saying things like, “I like your voice, your taste in beer, the way all your friends seem to admire you,” makes certain positive qualities belonging to one person explicitly valuable to the other. In particular, several studies investigate the ways we incorporate others into our sense of self. Aron’s research focuses on creating interpersonal closeness. For example: “Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner, a total of five items” (Question 22), and “Tell your partner what you like about them be very honest this time saying things you might not say to someone you’ve just met” (Question 28). The moments I found most uncomfortable were not when I had to make confessions about myself, but had to venture opinions about my partner. But rarely does adult life present us with such circumstances. At 13, away from home for the first time, it felt natural to get to know someone quickly. Ours was the kind of accelerated intimacy I remembered from summer camp, staying up all night with a new friend, exchanging the details of our short lives. Aron’s questions make it impossible to rely on that narrative. We all have a narrative of ourselves that we offer up to strangers and acquaintances, but Dr. We spent the next two hours passing my iPhone across the table, alternately posing each question. Not only that, but I see now that one neither suggests nor agrees to try an experiment designed to create romantic love if one isn’t open to this happening. Let me acknowledge the ways our experiment already fails to line up with the study. They invited the entire lab to the ceremony. The most tantalizing detail: Six months later, two participants were married. Then they stare silently into each other’s eyes for four minutes.

#Staring at the sun smile series

They sit face to face and answer a series of increasingly personal questions. A heterosexual man and woman enter the lab through separate doors. I explained the study to my university acquaintance. So, like a good academic, I turned to science, hoping there was a way to love smarter. Each time I thought of leaving, my heart overruled my brain. I first read about the study when I was in the midst of a breakup.