The science of falling
“Care to tell me your real name, doktora?” was how the message ended.
It was 4 a.m. and I had just been charmed over the phone. More specifically, over a dating app. It was terra incognita. Four days prior, bored out of my skull and lonely while studying for preresidency exams, I downloaded the app, haphazardly typing in answers to the probing personal questions designed to generate “matches,” and even selecting a photo that showed my face. It was never my intent to really “meet” anybody—because honestly, I thought, there had to be something wrong with someone who had to resort to dating sites—but I had realized that by the time I completed med school I would have been dateless for two years, and that my flirting muscles might need some flexing. The app seemed like a low-stakes way to do it. And here was an opportunity in the form of a beautifully written, perfectly grammatical message from a fellow doctor. I took a deep breath and replied to the first message that really caught my eye.
Before I knew it, this stranger named John and I were exchanging stories we’d written, telling each other how our days went, talking about our dreams. He’d taken a gap year before residency; I had chosen to go straight into surgery. He liked sports and Haruki Murakami; I liked cats and Hayao Miyazaki. We were both lapsed Catholics. We had common friends and were pretty sure that neither of us was an axe murderer. It seemed natural that a meet-up would be next—we got along, we were in the same profession and found each other at least reasonably attractive—but I was hesitant. I made excuses, pleaded work, said I was too busy for this added pressure. He kept pushing for a meet-up but eventually agreed to put it off. And so we just kept talking about, it seemed, everything. And before I knew it, I was completely smitten. At least for a while.
Recently I started reading the work of psychologist Arthur Aron, who conducted studies on “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness”—boffinspeak for “how to make two people fall in love.” The goal: to develop a feeling of “temporary closeness.” The method: a 45-minute period of structured and accelerating self-disclosure. This was based on the assumption, suggested by previous studies, that one thing vital to developing intimacy is “sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure”—in other words, the more, the faster and the deeper two people talked about themselves to each other, the more likely they would develop a feeling of mutual interest. The disclosure involved a series of questions ranging from whimsical (“Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?”) to the dramatic (“If you were to die… what would you most regret not having told someone?”).
It would be easy, but ultimately deceiving, to report that the study resulted in the subjects falling in love. Still, levels of postinteraction closeness were significantly increased in most pairings involved, especially when compared to the closeness generated by small talk. Who knew that the path to successful dates involved questions like “Whose death would you find most disturbing?”
The more I read about Aron’s studies, the more I thought about John. “What started you on writing?” John had asked me a few days into our online acquaintance. “What would make your 100-percent perfect girl?” I asked later. It was like Aron’s experiment without Aron himself.
I had never before allowed so much self-disclosure, or allowed someone to disclose so much, so fast. Despite the fact that I had never laid eyes on him before, the daily exchange of personal information—ranging from the trivial to the truly revealing—allowed us to feel a sort of accelerated but compelling closeness, so that when I finally bumped into him in a hospital lobby just a few weeks later, recognizing him only from his photos, it felt like a scene straight out of the movies. It felt like a forever waiting to happen.
In dissecting what happened between me and John—the leap into trusting somebody new, the thrill of discovery and connection, and the eventual fallout when it turned out that the closeness and intimacy we felt were in no way proportional to the commitments we were ready to make in real life—I’ve often wondered if genuine long-term connections are possible in a medium as artificial as online dating.
Obviously, online dating apps have had their share of success stories, but events have pushed me to consider that the organic way of meeting people may still be best. It may take longer to arrive at a sense of intimacy, but the closeness may be both more substantial and more sustainable. The dance of online dating always starts out with an awkward “hey” (or, in the case of one creative would-be suitor, “What item on the McDonald’s delivery menu interests you most and why?”), leading to the tedious “So what do you do” and the eventual exchange of phone numbers or
messages on Facebook.
Before you know it, you’re telling each other what you did during the day, what made you angry or what gave you joy—information that you would normally only discuss with your closest friends or family, not to a stranger with a photo-shopped display photo and an 84 match percent. Or is it possible that this is really dating in the postmodern world—quick to start and to deepen, and quick to end? Who knows if the connection John and I had was genuine? Who knows if it would have lasted longer if we had kept up the self-disclosure on a regular basis? If I met someone new, would it be possible to feel the same way again—smitten, trusting, cherished—if I used the same experiment questions? Who knows if it could have been forever? But then maybe these aren’t questions designed to be answerable by experiments.
Still, I’m nothing if not a scientist.
In the middle of an on-call night in the hospital, my phone buzzes. “Hey,” says a message from a guy named Mike. “How are you doing?”
It’s a few days after I’ve reactivated my dating site account, and a couple of months after I’ve recovered from the trauma of my last disastrous online “fling.” After a moment of hesitation, I plunge in, opening my saved file of Aron’s list of questions. “I’m doing great,” I reply. “Say, would you like to conduct an experiment?”
Kay Rivera, 26, is a physician in training in a hospital in Quezon City.
