In 2015, the New York Times ran a “Modern Love” column that might have made it into your inbox. The title, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This,” apparently tapped into some of our collective anxieties and quickly went viral. In the essay, writer Mandy Len Catron tells the story of using a set of increasingly intimate questions to get to know a potential romantic partner. The 36 questions, actually developed many years prior as an experimental research tool by Arthur Aron and colleagues, are designed to accelerate close connection between two people. They start with “easy” ones, like Would you like to be famous? In what way? (#2), but lead inexorably to 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? (#33).

The purpose of this task was to help the pairs develop a close bond in a short period of time, by accelerating through the moments of connection that would otherwise naturally occur as a friendship or relationship develops. As the researchers wrote in their landmark 1997 academic article, “One key pattern associated with the development of a close relationship among peers is sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self‑ disclosure.” The New York Times writer who tried this test nearly 20 years after it was developed answered honestly and thoughtfully, then … fell in love.

That writer’s experience isn’t dissimilar from what comes of advice dispensed by relationship experts John Gottman and Julie Schwartz Gottman. Their book Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love walks readers through a series of conversations on everything from finances to sex, all of them designed to help couples enact vulnerability and therefore connect more deeply. These dating tips are consistent with what we know about the psychology and biology of close relationships. Dating is the process of getting to know someone, and disclosing yourself to them is essential to establishing close bonds — and eventually, possibly, feelings of romantic love.

The proliferation of technologies has made it easier than ever to find potential dates, but at some point you have to actually meet the person, and dating is the process of engaging your brain with someone else’s, accumulating information, and using all your senses to narrow in on whether that person has what you truly want in a partner. It’s all trial and error, and what science tells us is that going on those dates is important to cultivating intimacy.

A friend of mine had been divorced from her husband of a decade for about three years when she finally downloaded a couple of dating apps. “It’s just so exhausting to even know where to start,” she’d say to me anytime I saw her. “The process of learning about someone new and sharing things about yourself … ugh.” Getting to know someone can feel daunting, but she persisted, if for no other reason than to meet people in her city. Her first week of swiping netted a date with an attractive lapsed Catholic with a long history of exploring psychedelics, a high school history teacher who coached powderpuff football in a pink tutu, and a fisheries biologist who’d lost his mother as a young man, around the same age she’d lost her father. When I spoke to her next, she was beaming — “Justin! People are just so interesting!” — even though none of those dates had generated a romantic spark.

My friend’s delight points to a central truth about dating: It is a highly efficient process by which we learn about other people. Because humans form preferential social relationships, most of our interactions are with people we don’t necessarily know very well. You might see a neighbor or colleague every day for 10 years and never know that person as well as someone you’ve just met but with whom you’ve just shared your happiest childhood memories. Exercises like Aron’s 36 questions are designed to reveal the most interesting, truest things about a person, and self‑ disclosure, trust building, and mutual appreciation accelerate closeness. If you’re doing it with someone you’re attracted to and if you’re psychologically available, it can also be a shortcut to building romantic feelings.

The more you know about a person, the more likely you are to find common ground. Let’s say you’re a vegan whose passion is rock climbing, but you meet someone for whom the idea of a perfect date is a steak dinner followed by a cozy night in reading on the couch. You very well could be a good match for a whole host of reasons, but if outdoor sports and environmental activism are your primary interests, your predetermined dealmakers, you’re probably not going to ask the meat‑eating homebody out for a second date unless you learn a lot more about them. As we get to know each other we can sometimes find unexpected opportunities to connect with and be attracted to each other.

The same tools that help two strangers accelerate intimacy can also help couples maintain an intimate connection as their relationship matures over time. Dating shouldn’t be a process that ends when commitment begins. My research has convinced me that the best way to maintain intimacy in a relationship is to continue to date your partner throughout the entirety of your relationship. Yet, finding the time to reaffirm those intimate bonds can easily get lost in the shuffle of our busy lives, especially in cases where people have very different social networks or work schedules or live in different geographical regions. 

For our relationships to work, we have to stay curious: about ourselves, about our partner, and about the two of us together.

One long‑distance relationship strategy I’ve personally employed is to watch or stream a TV show with a partner either synchronously over video chat or while live‑texting each other. Watching the same reality TV show from your respective homes may not seem like a bonding activity, but research studies have demonstrated that sharing media or entertainment is associated with greater relationship quality, especially in cases where couples don’t have common social circles. It gives us something to talk about, and a jumping‑off point for exploring each other and ourselves within the partnership. What storyline or character did you find funny, interesting, or upsetting, and why? Shared activities like watching a common television show can help promote high relationship satisfaction by providing an opportunity to connect while exploring each other’s likes and dislikes.

Studies have shown the benefits of mutual ritual: The things we do over and over with a partner can help us build security and trust. But the flip side of such routine is the potential for boredom and lethargy. Satisfying relationships have consistent patterns and rituals while also making room for curiosity and novelty. There are a lot of ways to accomplish this balance, and it often doesn’t take much. For example, during the pandemic, a friend of mine and her partner got in the habit of taking a daily walk through their neighborhood, phones in pockets, just walking and talking, together. They would observe the changing seasons through their street’s trees, note any new holiday decorations, point out interesting landscaping. As new homeowners, their walks gave them ideas for how to continue to make their house feel like a home. But over time, my friend told me, the ritual got a bit stale. As the months of quarantine went on, she discovered that for the walks to be both pleasurable and useful, they needed variety: Things didn’t change enough on their street to make it interesting, day after day. So they began altering their route ever so slightly, walking one block farther north, west, or east. Sometimes, if they felt they’d seen all they could see, they’d get in the car and drive to another neighborhood. The routine required curiosity and variety to remain satisfying.

For our relationships to work, we have to stay curious: about ourselves, about our partner, and about the two of us together. And we have to continue to pay attention through all the changes.