Mandy Len Catron
speaker
33 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Mandy Len Catron’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I just like remember this moment of, oh no, I love him.
We spoke on the phone many times because I was very, very reluctant and very shy and not ready. So we had months and months of phone dates, and they were spectacular. We laughed. We had so much oxytocin flying through the air. It was just deliriously wonderful. And we fell in love and we're getting married this summer in our backyard.
No, not under any circumstances could I have possibly imagined any of it. Yeah. Really, I have heard from people all over the world since the article came out, especially in the first couple of years. Like I've gotten a significant number of emails from people who got married. Like I've had people send me their wedding photos.
Yeah, I mean, and this was like, like Mark and I weren't married and I thought, oh, wow, like this is amazing. I don't know. I kind of think about it as something that exists apart from me. It came out at a time where a lot of people were dating online and there was this kind of craving for intimacy. I think online dating can feel... really dehumanizing at times.
Like we're going down the checklist, we're objectifying one another and looking for somebody who meets these predetermined criteria. And this is kind of the opposite of that. And so I think it kind of struck a chord.
To fall in love with anyone, do this. More than 20 years ago, the psychologist Arthur Aaron succeeded in making two strangers fall in love in his laboratory. Last summer, I applied his technique in my own life, which is how I found myself standing on a bridge at midnight, staring into a man's eyes for exactly four minutes. Let me explain.
Earlier in the evening, that man had said, I suspect, given a few commonalities, you could fall in love with anyone. If so, how do you choose someone? He was a university acquaintance I occasionally ran into at the climbing gym and had thought, what if? I had gotten a glimpse into his days on Instagram, but this was the first time we had hung out one-on-one.
Actually, psychologists have tried making people fall in love. I said, it's fascinating. I've always wanted to try it. I first read about the study when I was in the midst of a breakup. Each time I thought of leaving, my heart overruled my brain. I felt stuck. So, like a good academic, I turned to science, hoping there was a way to love smarter. I explain the study to my university acquaintance.
A heterosexual man and woman enter the lab through separate doors. They sit face to face and answer a series of increasingly personal questions. Then they stare silently into each other's eyes for four minutes. The most tantalizing detail? Six months later, two participants were married. They invited the entire lab to the ceremony. Let's try it, he said.
Let me acknowledge the ways our experiment already fails to line up with the study. First, we were in a bar, not a lab. Second, we weren't strangers. 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. I googled Dr. Aaron's questions. There are 36. They begin innocuously.
Would you like to be famous? When did you last sing to yourself or to someone else? But they quickly become probing. In response to the prompt, name three things you and your partner appear to have in common, he looked at me and said, I think we're both interested in each other. I grinned and gulped my beer as he listed two more commonalities I then promptly forgot.
We exchanged stories about the last time we each cried and confessed the one thing we'd like to ask a fortune teller. We explained our relationships with our mothers. The questions reminded me of the infamous boiling frog experiment in which the frog doesn't feel the water getting hotter until it's too late.
With us, because the level of vulnerability increased gradually, I didn't notice we had entered intimate territory until we were already there. I liked learning about myself through my answers, but I liked learning things about him even more. The bar, which was empty when we arrived, had filled up by the time we paused for a bathroom break.
I sat alone at our table, aware of my surroundings for the first time in an hour, and wondered if anyone had been listening to our conversation. If they had, I hadn't noticed. And I did not notice as the crowd thinned and the night got late. We finished at midnight, taking far longer than the 90 minutes for the original study. Looking around the bar, I felt as if I had just woken up
That wasn't so bad, I said, definitely less uncomfortable than the staring into each other's eyes part would be. He hesitated and asked, do you think we should do that too? Here? I looked around the bar. It seemed too weird, too public. We could stand on the bridge, he said, turning toward the window. The night was warm and I was wide awake.
We walked to the highest point, then turned to face each other. I fumbled with my phone as I set the timer. "'Okay,' I said, inhaling sharply. "'Okay,' he said, smiling." I've skied steep slopes and hung from a rock face by a short length of rope, but staring into someone's eyes for four silent minutes was one of the more thrilling and terrifying experiences of my life.
I spent the first couple of minutes just trying to breathe properly. There was a lot of nervous smiling until, eventually, we settled in. I know the eyes are the window to the soul or whatever, but the real crux of the moment was not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me.
Once I embraced the terror of this realization and gave it time to subside, I arrived somewhere unexpected. I felt brave and in a state of wonder. Part of that wonder was at my own vulnerability, and part of it was the weird kind of wonder you get from saying a word over and over until it loses its meaning and becomes what it actually is, an assemblage of sounds.
When the timer buzzed, I was surprised and a little relieved, but also I felt a sense of loss. Already I was beginning to see our evening through the surreal and unreliable lens of retrospect. Most of us think about love as something that happens to us. We fall, we get crushed. But what I like about this study is how it assumes that love is an action.
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. I wondered what would come of our interaction. If nothing else, I thought it would make a good story. But I see now that the story isn't about us.
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