In love with fashion love1/1/2024 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. The sentiment associated with the eye fell away and I was struck by its astounding biological reality: the spherical nature of the eyeball, the visible musculature of the iris and the smooth wet glass of the cornea. So it was with the eye, which is not a window to anything but rather a clump of very useful cells. Part of that wonder was at my own vulnerability and part 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. Once I embraced the terror of this realization and gave it time to subside, I arrived somewhere unexpected. I know the eyes are the windows 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. There was a lot of nervous smiling until, eventually, we settled in. I spent the first couple of minutes just trying to breathe properly. 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. “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. They began innocuously: “Would you like to be famous? In what way?” And “When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?” ![]() 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. 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.
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