Credit first. The questions on this page were written for a 1997 paper by Arthur Aron, Edward Melinat, Elaine Aron, Robert Vallone and Renee Bator, The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness, where they sit in an appendix as three sets of slips. They reached most of the world through Mandy Len Catron's January 2015 Modern Love essay, To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This, which is also where the four minutes of eye contact come from. This page is an independent worksheet built on the published procedure; it is not affiliated with the authors, with Catron or with The New York Times, and none of them have reviewed or endorsed it.

What the study did

Aron's team paired up strangers, sat each pair down for forty-five minutes, and handed them three sets of slips. The instructions in the appendix are the whole method: one of you reads a slip aloud and answers it first, then the other answers the same slip, and you alternate who reads aloud with each new one. No skipping, no reordering. Each set had a third of the time, and the pairs were told it did not matter if they ran out of slips before the time was up. The questions grow more personal as they go, from dinner guests and telephone calls in Set I to family, regret and crying in Set III.

A comparison group spent the same forty-five minutes on small-talk questions. Afterwards both groups rated how close they felt to their partner, including on a picture scale Aron had published a few years earlier, a row of overlapping circles where you pick the pair that looks most like the two of you. The pairs who had worked through the escalating slips felt closer than the pairs who had chatted. That is the finding. It was measured minutes after the conversation, between strangers, in a lab.

What it did not show

The paper reports nobody falling in love, and the authors were not trying to make anyone. When the list went viral, Elaine Aron told Berkeley's news office that the questions had not been created to help anyone fall in love; the procedure was built to produce a temporary sense of closeness on demand so that closeness itself could be studied. Catron's essay is honest about this too. Her argument was that closeness can be chosen and built, not that a list conjures romance, and the story of a pilot pair who later married and invited the lab to the wedding is an anecdote she recounts rather than a result in the paper.

The four minutes of looking come from Catron, not from the slips. Mutual gaze has its own small literature: a 1989 lab study found that strangers asked to hold each other's eyes for two minutes reported warmer feelings towards each other than pairs who had looked at hands or counted blinks. Catron and her partner did it for four, standing on a bridge in Vancouver. So this page treats the gaze as optional and keeps it quiet: no sound, no countdown, just a painted night lifting off a river while you look somewhere else.

How this page works

Write two names on the two banks. The first slip is read aloud by the left bank, who answers it first; the second passes to the right bank; and so on through thirty-six, exactly as the appendix asks. Each time you both finish a question, one of you taps and a plank of a footbridge goes down from the reader's side, blue from the left, rose from the right. Set I builds the shallows at either bank, Set II reaches midstream, and the twelve slips of Set III meet in the deep channel in the middle. The bridge is the only score, and it counts one thing: that you got there.

Between sets the page stops and says so, which is your cue to refill the glasses. You can pause anywhere and your place is kept, with the next slip face down until you are both back. A mis-tap can be lifted with two taps, so nothing is lost. After the thirty-sixth plank the four-minute panel appears, and two short handwriting lines ask what each of you will keep from the evening.

The thirty-six, in their sets

Set I

1. Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?
2. Would you like to be famous? In what way?
3. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?
4. What would constitute a "perfect" day for you?
5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?
6. If you were able to live to the age of ninety and retain either the mind or body of a thirty-year-old for the last sixty years of your life, which would you want?
7. Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?
8. Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common.
9. For what in your life do you feel most grateful?
10. If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?
11. Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.
12. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?

Set II

13. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future, or anything else, what would you want to know?
14. Is there something that you've dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven't you done it?
15. What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?
16. What do you value most in a friendship?
17. What is your most treasured memory?
18. What is your most terrible memory?
19. If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?
20. What does friendship mean to you?
21. What roles do love and affection play in your life?
22. Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner. Share a total of five items.
23. How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people's?
24. How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?

Set III

25. Make three true "we" statements each. For instance, "We are both in this room feeling…"
26. Complete this sentence: "I wish I had someone with whom I could share…"
27. If you were going to become a close friend with your partner, please share what would be important for them to know.
28. Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things that you might not say to someone you've just met.
29. Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life.
30. When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?
31. Tell your partner something that you like about them already.
32. What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?
33. If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven't you told them yet?
34. Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why?
35. Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why?
36. Share a personal problem and ask your partner's advice on how they might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.

When to use it

Bring it to a first date that has run out of small talk, or to someone you have known for ten years and been careful with for nine of them. The slips have since been used between strangers of every kind, and the closeness they produce is not aimed at romance; friends and siblings get as much out of the deep channel as couples do. If you would rather warm up with something lighter, The Couples Quiz deals twelve guess-the-answer cards with no confessions required. If the evening goes well and you want somewhere to put the next one, The Date Night Jar is built for that, and the Couples Check-In gives an established pair a weekly rhythm once the bridge is across.