These Are The Questions One Psychologist Says Can Make You Fall In Love With A Stranger

What if love wasn't as passive as we tend to picture it being? What if - instead of stumbling into it as a result of chance or fate - we actively choose it?

In 1997, State University of New York psychologist Arthur Aron tested the idea that two people who were willing to feel more connected to one another could do so, even within a short time frame.

(The experiment is featured prominently in a recent Modern Love column in The New York Times; more on that here.)

For his study, Aron separated two groups of people, then paired people up within their groups and had them chat with one another for 45 minutes. While the first group of pairs spent the 45 minutes engaging in small-talk, the second group got a list of questions that gradually grew more intimate.

Not surprisingly, the pairs who asked the gradually more probing questions felt closer and more connected after the 45 minutes were up. Six months later, two of the participants (a tiny fraction of the original study group) even found themselves in love - an intriguing result, though not a significant one.

Here are the 36 questions the pairs in Aron's test group asked one another, broken up into three sets. Each set is intended to be more intimate than the one that came before.

Try them out, and let us know what happens.