Arthur Aron
speaker
91 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Arthur Aron’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Well, yes. I mean, the other person, you've already expanded by including them. I mean, if you were to break up with them, you would lose that. We've shown it's hard to break up a relationship if you have a lot of sense of expansion, including them in the self. So, no, the process of getting there is exciting. But once you're there, you get used to it.
You wouldn't want to lose it, but you get used to it. Now, if you or your partner, if you do something exciting together, you associate that with the partner. If you have some expansion together, or if your partner has an expansion that you can feel connected to, even as an individual, that can be expanding to the self.
There was a student in the class who I had a lot of sort of conflict with. The last day of class, we walked out. We looked at each other. I can still remember this so vividly. We looked at each other a minute and we kissed. And from that moment on, we've been living together. We just celebrated our 50th anniversary. It was so intense. And in fact, it's really what prompted my studying love.
I was a graduate student in social psychology and the idea then was to look for a topic that people think can't be studied scientifically and do it. And there was very little research on love at that time. So that became, you know, what I decided to study, but no, I fell intensely in love with this woman.
It was wonderful. About two months later, we started living together. It was very intense and wonderful. We made a big decision a couple years later to have a baby. We didn't want to get married because, you know, coming from Berkeley in those years, we didn't like the idea. But when our son was four years old, he came home and said, Mommy, what's a bastard? And we thought we'd better get married.
So we've been living together actually 57 years, but we've been married for 50.
One is that each would answer the question and then the other would answer and they'd go on. So they could hear each other and have a chance to be responsive. Another element was the questions were designed so that they'd move from not being very intimate or close to being more and more intimate stuff.
you know if you get on a plane and you talk about your you sit down with someone you start talking about the most intense things in your life you can put them off so if you start with you know smaller things and then gradually move to bigger and you go both ways so it's just so the first set is fairly mundane you know if you go out to dinner with anyone in the world throughout history who would you go out to dinner you know and then they get more and more personal
One of the things that makes people want to get close is to feel they have things in common. Actually having them isn't as important as feeling they do. In the second set, I think we have an item that say, name some things you've noticed you have in common. We never say name some things you don't have in common.
Yeah, and even those get a little stronger as you move ahead, but yes, within the first 12.
Yeah, that's right. That's the idea. We want to create closeness in 45 minutes.
Well, they get closer. This closeness procedure in 45 minutes really works. It doesn't necessarily keep them close in the long term, but certainly right afterwards, they often report feeling as close to the person they were doing the activity with as to the closest person in their life. It really creates a sense of intense closeness.
Self-disclosure provides an opportunity for deep responsiveness. You know, when you interact with someone and, you know, you say something and you feel they've heard you, they understand you, they care about you, that matters a lot.
That's a huge effect. Feeling someone likes you, it really matters for getting close to them. In fact, it's a major factor that we found in falling in love. You know, we've done a lot of surveys where we ask people who've recently fallen in love what happened. And a major thing is I discover the other person liked me.
So, for example, a person is saying, you know, I met this woman and, you know, I kind of liked her. And I ran into her at a store and she looked at me and she smiled at me. And at that moment, I fell in love immediately.
heard so many stories like that at that moment where I discovered my friend said oh you know this person likes you don't you those sorts of things they really can matter a lot you know oh I ran into this person again and he sat down next to me you know you know those kinds of things really matter
The longer one is an hour and a half, and it has a lot of questions towards the end that, you know, are, you know, imagine you've fallen in love with this person. Tell them what you feel. You know, things like that.
It also has the item people talk about a lot that are not in the 36 questions, but, you know, look in their eyes for three minutes, in each other's eyes, things like that towards the end. that really are aimed at creating romantic feelings. We tried to be very careful doing that study, not to include people who are already in relationships.
Two of the students in my lab tried this out, you know, to experiment, and they literally fell in love, and they got married.
Well, there'd been, again, a lot of survey research showing that when you have close friends, relationships are better. So we were able to randomly assign couples to do this as a couple with another. So all the four of them answered each question. And we found that after doing this as a foursome, it much increased their passionate love for each other. It doesn't make you love the other people.
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