Meghan Sullivan

They lived in your intestines.

If you wanted to make someone an ancient philosophy-inspired Valentine, you wouldn't cut them out of heart.

You would literally cut them out of coil of intestines and like a liver and a kidney and give it to them.

That's where love lived.

The Samaritan loved in his guts.

And he stopped and he helped the man.

He nursed him back to health all night.

Aristotle thought that what connects us with other people, what dissolves that membrane, is expectation of virtue and achievement.

But Jesus thought what dissolves the membrane, what really connects us with other people, is vulnerability.

And what's interesting about connecting with people on vulnerability is that you can do it with absolutely anyone.

We might not all be physically beaten up, laying dying by the side of the road, but we've all been beaten up by life.

We all have some element of that beaten man inside of us and that

is where the love connection can happen.

You don't have to take my word for it.

I think one of the most interesting studies in social psychology, 30 years ago, Arthur Aaron did this amazing experiment where he showed that he could cause strangers to love each other in a lab in under an hour.

And here was the experiment.

He'd pair people up, and he would have them ask each other's questions that required them to be increasingly vulnerable.

It would start with simple questions like, who's someone you'd like to have dinner with?

And end with questions like, which member of your family would you be most disturbed to discover had died?

People reported, 30% of participants in Aaron's study reported feelings of closeness that rivaled how they felt towards their most intimate partners and towards their best friends.