The 36 Questions to Fall in Love: The Full List, the Study, and How Couples Use Them

The short version

The 36 questions to fall in love are a research procedure, not a magic spell. In 1997, psychologist Arthur Aron and four colleagues published a way to create closeness between two strangers in 45 minutes: three sets of 12 questions, each set more personal than the last, with both people answering every one. Pairs who did it felt closer than pairs who made small talk.

The questions became famous in 2015, when a New York Times essay showed what happened when a writer tried them on a date. Below you'll find all 36, what the study actually found, how to do them, and how to use them if you've been together for years.

Where the 36 questions came from

The 36 questions come from a paper by Arthur Aron, Edward Melinat, Elaine Aron, Robert Vallone and Renee Bator, "The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness", in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 1997. The goal was a reliable way to make strangers feel close in a lab, so researchers could study closeness.

Here's how the study worked:

• Who: students in psychology classes, paired with someone they didn't know.
• How: each pair got three sets of slips. They took turns reading a slip aloud, and both answered, the reader first.
• Timing: about 15 minutes per set, 45 minutes in total. Pairs were told it didn't matter whether they finished.
• The comparison: other pairs got small-talk slips instead, such as describing the last time they walked for more than an hour.

In the first study, the closeness pairs rated their closeness at 4.06 on average against 3.25 for the small-talk pairs, a large effect by psychology standards. The authors noted that after 45 minutes, the average pair felt about as close as the 30th percentile of how students rated the closest relationship in their lives.

Two details get lost in the retelling. First, the later studies in the paper found that matching people on shared attitudes, telling them their partner would probably like them, or making closeness an explicit goal made no significant difference. The questions did the work. Second, the romance. An earlier, longer version of the procedure produced anecdotes of lasting bonds, "including one pair who married!" as the authors put it. That's one pair. The study measured closeness, never love.

The Modern Love essay that made them famous

In January 2015, writer Mandy Len Catron published a Modern Love essay in The New York Times called "To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This." She and an acquaintance worked through the 36 questions, then stood on a bridge at midnight and stared into each other's eyes for four minutes. They fell in love. In an interview with Hazlitt about her later book, How to Fall in Love with Anyone, she said that when people asked whether they were still together, the answer was yes.

The essay drew more than eight million views in its first month, Catron said in her TEDx talk, "Falling in love is the easy part". In the same talk she made the point the internet skipped: they were in love because they each chose to be, and staying in love means choosing it again.

One correction worth knowing. The four minutes of eye contact is not in the 1997 paper. The published procedure is the 36 questions alone, and Catron herself has said the version with eye contact was never published. You can add it. You don't need it.

The 36 questions that lead to love, in three sets

These are the 36 questions to fall in love in the order of the original study. They're written here in our own words, kept close to the meaning of each one. The original wording is in the appendix of the 1997 paper. Take turns reading, and both answer every question.

Set I: getting comfortable

1. If you could have anyone in the world over for dinner, who would you pick?
2. Do you want to be famous? Famous for what?
3. Do you ever rehearse what you'll say before you make a phone call? Why?
4. What would your perfect day look like?
5. When did you last sing to yourself? And to someone else?
6. If you'd live to 90 and could keep either the mind or the body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years, which would you choose?
7. Do you have a private hunch about how you'll die?
8. Name three things you and your partner seem to have in common.
9. What in your life are you most grateful for?
10. If you could change one thing about how you were raised, what would it be?
11. Take four minutes to tell your partner your life story, in as much detail as you can.
12. If you could wake up tomorrow with one new quality or ability, what would you want it to be?

Set II: going deeper

13. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about anything (yourself, your life, the future), what would you ask it?
14. Is there something you've dreamed about doing for a long time? What has stopped you?
15. What's the greatest thing you've ever accomplished?
16. What do you value most in a friendship?
17. What memory do you treasure most?
18. What's your worst memory?
19. If you knew you would die suddenly in a year, would you change how you're living now? Why?
20. What does friendship mean to you?
21. What part do love and affection play in your life?
22. Take turns naming something you see as a good quality in your partner, five each.
23. How close and warm is your family? Do you think your childhood was happier than most people's?
24. How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?

Set III: the closest of all

25. Make three true "we" statements each, such as "We are both in this room feeling..."
26. Finish this sentence: "I wish I had someone I could share..."
27. If you were going to become close friends with your partner, what would be important for them to know about you?
28. Tell your partner what you like about them. Be very honest, and say things you might not say to someone you just met.
29. Tell your partner about an embarrassing moment in your life.
30. When did you last cry in front of someone? And on your own?
31. Tell your partner something you already like about them.
32. Is anything too serious to joke about? What?
33. If you died tonight without a chance to talk to anyone, what would you most regret not having said, and to whom? Why haven't you said it yet?
34. Your home catches fire with everything you own inside. Your loved ones and pets are safe, and you have time for one last run to save a single item. What do you grab, and why?
35. Of everyone in your family, whose death would hit you hardest? Why?
36. Share a personal problem and ask how your partner would handle it. Then ask them to reflect back how you seem to feel about it.

How to do the 36 questions

The original instructions were simple, and they still work for anyone looking for questions to ask to fall in love, or to fall back in love. Most couples who say "it didn't work" skipped one of these.

Pick a night without a deadline. A long dinner, a drive, or a walk works better than sitting across a desk. In Delhi, a winter afternoon in one of these places for couples in Delhi gives you both the walk and the quiet. If one of you gets emotional in Set III, stay on that question. That's the procedure working.

How to do the 36 questions as a long-term couple

The questions were built for strangers, so a couple who's been together for years needs one change: guess before you hear. Before your partner answers, say what you think they'll say. Then listen to what they actually say.

You'll be right a lot in Set I. You'll be wrong more often than you expect in Sets II and III, because people change and the picture we hold of a partner tends to freeze around the time we got serious. Every wrong guess is something new to learn about a person you thought you had memorized.

A few more tweaks for couples who've been together a while:

• Answer as you are now. For questions like 4 and 14, add "and what would I have said when we met?"
• Split it over three nights. One set per night keeps it from feeling like homework.
• Do Set III somewhere new. In a 2000 study by Aron and colleagues, couples who did a novel and exciting task together for seven minutes reported bigger gains in relationship quality than couples who did a mundane one. A new place counts.
• Try a double date. In a 2014 study from Keith Welker, Richard Slatcher, Aron and colleagues, couples who did a high-disclosure version of these questions with another couple reported more passionate love for their own partner afterward, according to Wayne State University's summary, especially when the other couple responded warmly.

Do the 36 questions really work? What newer research says

Short answer: yes for closeness, unproven for love. Later studies keep finding that structured, escalating self-disclosure brings people closer than small talk. None of them show the questions can make two incompatible people fall in love, and the original pairs were students in a classroom study, so treat the romance as a happy side effect, not a promise.

What the newer research adds:

• The effect holds up. In 2021, researcher Susan Sprecher compared Aron's closeness task with his small-talk task and with an unstructured getting-to-know-you chat. The 36 questions produced more closeness and other positive outcomes, especially compared with small talk.
• Video works. In the same study, pairs met either face to face or over video chat, and the mode made no significant difference. That's good news for long-distance couples.
• It can help long-term couples too. The Welker study above suggests the closeness spills over into passion for your own partner.
• We fear deep talk more than we should. Across a series of experiments, Kardas, Kumar and Epley (2022) found people overestimate how awkward deep conversations will be and underestimate how much the other person cares. The hard part of the 36 questions is starting.

Turn the 36 questions into a game

If reading a list across the table feels stiff, play it instead. Answering separately and revealing together takes the pressure off, because neither of you has to watch the other's face mid-answer.

That's how the couple games inside Adoree work. Adoree is an AI relationship assistant that each of you talks to privately, by voice or text, and it has 12 couple games built in, picked for you two. Each of you plays on your own phone, and the answers reveal only once you've both answered. Then Adoree adds a short note on what your answers say about the two of you. Firsts, 2035 and The Unsent Text carry the same spirit as Set III in a lighter shape. The games need a connected partner. You can read more about the people behind Adoree.

Finished all 36? Keep going with these deep questions to ask your partner, sorted by theme and depth. For a lighter night, try our never have I ever questions for couples. Every list we have lives in the questions and games hub.