The 36 Questions to Fall in Love: The Full List, the Study, and How to Do It

Somewhere right now, two people are sitting at a kitchen table with a phone propped against the salt shaker, reading question 18 out loud and quietly regretting it. “What is your most terrible memory?” It’s a lot for a Tuesday.

That’s the 36 questions to fall in love doing exactly what they were built to do. They start easy, get personal, and by the end they ask you to say things most people save for year three. (Some people find that thrilling. Some people go and make tea.)

Below you’ll find all 36 questions in their original order, plus the part most lists skip: what the study actually tested, what it never claimed, and how to run the whole thing so it creates closeness instead of a very long, very awkward evening.

Where the 36 Questions Came From

In 1997, psychologist Arthur Aron and his colleagues published a study with a modest-sounding goal. Could they create closeness between two strangers, in a lab, on purpose, in about 45 minutes?

Pairs of students who had never met worked through three sets of questions, fifteen minutes per set, each set more personal than the last. A comparison group spent the same time on small-talk prompts like “What is your favorite holiday?” The original paper in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin is called “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness,” which is about as unromantic as a title gets.

The question pairs reported feeling significantly closer than the small-talk pairs. Not in love. Closer.

The love part came later.

In 2015, writer Mandy Len Catron tried the questions with a university acquaintance and wrote about it in the New York Times column “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This”. They fell in love. The essay went everywhere, and a careful piece of social psychology picked up a nickname its authors never gave it.

What the Study Actually Found (and What It Didn’t)

Before you try this, it helps to know what you’re really doing. Most articles get at least one of these wrong.

• It was a closeness study, not a love study. Aron’s team measured how close people felt, not whether they wanted to date.
• It worked on strangers. The whole point was to see how fast closeness could form between people with no history at all.
• The four minutes of eye contact wasn’t in the study. Catron added it, borrowing from a separate 1989 study on mutual gaze. It’s a lovely, terrifying ending. It’s just not part of the original procedure.
• The order mattered. The sets escalate on purpose. Jumping straight to question 33 with someone you met an hour ago isn’t the experiment. It’s an ambush.

Researchers have since adapted the method, sometimes called the “Fast Friends” procedure, to help people build friendships across social groups, which tells you something important. The questions aren’t a romance trick.

They’re a closeness machine. What you do with the closeness is up to you.

Why It Works: Taking Turns Going a Little Further

The mechanism isn’t magic, and it isn’t really the questions either. It’s a pattern: one person reveals something, the other responds with care, and then they reveal something slightly bigger. Psychologists call this escalating, reciprocal self-disclosure. Most of us just call it the moment a conversation stops being polite and starts being real.

Each set raises the stakes a little. Set I asks about dinner guests and perfect days. Set III asks what you’d regret never saying. Because you climb together, neither person is ever far out on a ledge alone. That’s the design. (It’s also why vulnerability creates intimacy faster than small talk: being met is what makes the risk worth taking.)

When we asked people in the Bonded Research Lab what actually helps them open up, almost two thirds chose feeling listened to or feeling safe. Fewer than one in ten chose “the right questions.”

That sounds like bad news for a list of 36 questions. It isn’t. It’s the instruction manual. The questions are the scaffolding. The listening is the building.

How to Do the 36 Questions Properly

You don’t need a lab. You do need a few conditions, because without them the questions turn into a quiz.

• Give it an hour. The study used 45 minutes. Add some slack for the answers that run long, because some will.
• Put the phones away. Read from paper, or from one phone face-up on the table and nothing else.
• Both of you answer every question. Take turns going first. Reciprocity is the engine, so a one-sided interview won’t work.
• Go in order. The escalation is the point. Resist the urge to skip to the juicy ones.
• Listen, don’t fix. Follow-up questions are welcome. Advice, debate, and “well, actually” are not.
• Passing is allowed. If a question is too much tonight, say so and move on. Safety is part of the method, not a break from it.

If you want Catron’s ending, finish with four minutes of eye contact. You will laugh in the first thirty seconds. Everyone does. Keep going anyway.

Set I: The 36 Questions, Part One

The warm-up. Light enough to answer without thinking too hard, specific enough that you learn something real.

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 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 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?

Question 11 is the quiet giant of Set I. Four minutes is longer than it sounds, and what someone chooses to include in their life story tells you more than any single answer.

Set II: The Questions That Get Personal

Here the questions stop asking what you like and start asking what you value. Slow down a little.

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?

Notice question 22. It’s the first time the questions ask you to say something kind, out loud, to the person in front of you. Five items each. It’s harder than it looks, and it changes the temperature of the room.

Set III: The Questions That Ask You to Be Brave

The final set turns the questions toward the two of you. This is where the closeness the study measured really builds.

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.

A gentle note. Several questions in Sets II and III touch family, grief, and death (19, 23, 24, 33, and 35 especially). If either of you is carrying a recent loss, skip or soften them. Nothing about the method depends on any single question, and closeness built on someone’s fresh grief isn’t the kind you want.

Question 36 is the quiet masterpiece of the whole list. It doesn’t just ask for advice. It asks your partner to tell you how you seem to feel, which means they have to have been listening all along.

Can You Do the 36 Questions With a Long-Term Partner?

Yes, and it’s often more surprising than doing it with a stranger.

Couples assume they already know these answers. Then question 26 comes up (“I wish I had someone with whom I could share…”) and the answer isn’t what either of you expected. People keep changing. The person you’ve been with for six years has updated a few things without sending you the patch notes.

One rule helps: answer as who you are now, not as who you were when you met. If you want more after the 36, our intimate questions to ask your partner pick up where Set III leaves off, and 100 questions to feel closer is a gentler, longer walk through similar ground.

Can You Do Them on a First Date?

You can. Whether you should depends on the date.

The full list on a first date is a big ask, and suggesting it can feel like proposing a trust exercise over appetizers. Set I, though, works beautifully on an early date, especially if you frame it as a game rather than a test. If it’s going well, Set II will invite itself.

For something built specifically for early dating, try these questions to get to know someone romantically, sorted by what each answer tells you about whether you two fit.

What to Expect Afterwards

Most people come out of the 36 questions feeling closer, sometimes oddly tender, sometimes a little exposed. That last one is normal. Brené Brown calls it a vulnerability hangover: the next-morning wobble of “did I really say all that?”

Some people feel nothing dramatic at all. That’s information too. The questions create the conditions for closeness. They can’t manufacture chemistry that isn’t there, and they shouldn’t.

If it went well, say so the next day. A short message (“I keep thinking about your answer to 17”) does more to lock in the closeness than any of the questions did.

A Few Things to Keep in Mind

Don’t use the questions to fix a relationship in crisis. They build closeness between people who feel safe with each other. They’re not a substitute for a hard conversation, or for a therapist when you need one.

Don’t keep score. Some answers will be long and some will be a single sentence. The study didn’t measure word count, and neither should you.

Don’t force the ending. If four minutes of eye contact feels like too much, hold hands, or just sit quietly for a minute. The point is to stay present, not to win a staring contest.

And do it more than once. The answers you give in a year will be different, and so will the person asking.

One Last Thing

The 36 questions became famous for promising love. Their real gift is smaller and better: proof that closeness isn’t a mystery you wait for. It’s something two people can build, one honest answer at a time, as long as someone is really listening.

That’s the idea behind Bonded, too. It’s a question game for two people, built on the same principle of going a little further together, with only one of you needing to install it. Use it when you want the structure without the printout. Or just use the list above, tonight, with the phone face-down.

You might also enjoy:

• Why vulnerability creates intimacy faster than small talk
• Intimate questions to ask your partner
• The science of human connection