Key takeaways
- The “36 questions” come from a 1997 study by psychologist Arthur Aron and colleagues, designed to build closeness between strangers in a lab, not as a relationship test.
- The questions escalate gradually from small talk to vulnerable disclosure, which the original research found reliably built closeness.
- Answering them once is memorable, but the mechanism behind them, gradual and mutual disclosure, is meant to be an ongoing practice, not a one-time trick.
- The questions became widely known after writer Mandy Len Catron referenced them in a popular 2015 essay about trying the exercise herself.
- Remembering and following up on what a partner shares is what turns a conversation into a lasting sense of being known.
Somewhere in the last decade, “the 36 questions” became relationship shorthand: a list you’re supposed to work through with someone to fall in love, or fall in love again. Fewer people know where the list came from, or what the original research was testing in the first place.
Where the questions began
In 1997, psychologist Arthur Aron and a team of colleagues published a study with an unglamorous title, “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness,” in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. The goal wasn’t romance. It was testing whether closeness between two strangers could be built deliberately, in a lab, in about 45 minutes.
The method they landed on was a set of 36 questions, organized into three sets, that start light (“Would you like to be famous? In what way?”) and escalate toward genuine vulnerability (“What is your most terrible memory?”). Participants took turns answering, out loud, to a stranger they’d just met. It worked: pairs who went through the full set reported feeling measurably closer to each other than pairs who made small talk for the same amount of time, right after a single 45-minute session with someone they’d never met before.
Why the questions escalate the way they do
The order isn’t arbitrary. Starting with something low-stakes lets two people establish a rhythm of answering honestly before anything difficult comes up. By the time the questions turn personal, there’s already a pattern of genuine back-and-forth to lean on. Jumping straight to the hardest questions, or answering out of order, skips the part of the mechanism that does the real work.
This matters for how to use the list well. Doing all 36 in one sitting isn’t required; that’s simply how the original study happened to be structured for its own purposes, forty-five minutes fitting neatly into a lab session with a stranger who’d go home afterward either way. Spreading them across a few conversations, in order, keeps the escalation intact while fitting into an ordinary evening rather than a research appointment. The order matters more than the pace.
Where the list became famous
The study sat in an academic journal for close to two decades before most people outside relationship research had heard of it. That changed in 2015, when writer Mandy Len Catron described trying the exercise with an acquaintance in a widely shared essay, crediting it with an unusually fast, genuine connection. The essay went viral well beyond what either the researchers or the writer likely expected from a personal account of one evening.
The list has circulated constantly since, in listicles, apps, date-night card decks, often stripped of the context that it was built to measure closeness experimentally, not to guarantee it for anyone who happens to work through it. That context is worth keeping: it’s a well-tested tool for opening a conversation, not a formula that produces a particular outcome on command.
Turning it into a practice, not a one-off
The questions are good at producing one memorable evening. What makes that evening matter later is what happens to the information afterward: whether the things learned get remembered, referenced, and acted on weeks or months later, or quietly forgotten by the following week.
That’s worth building into a habit rather than treating as a single event. Writing down a detail that came up, a fear mentioned, a memory shared, somewhere you’ll see it again (a running note, or something like By Heart’s Notes) does more for the relationship over time than the initial conversation alone. The questions open a door. What you do with what walks through it is the part that compounds, long after the specific answers are half-forgotten.
Sources
Aron, A., Melinat, E., Aron, E.N., Vallone, R.D., & Bator, R.J. (1997). “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23(4). DOI: 10.1177/0146167297234003