5. Mandy Len Catron: Falling in love is the easy part | TED Talk

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Mandy Len Catron: Falling in love is the easy part | TED Talk

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00:17
I published this article in the New York Times Modern Love column
in January of this year. “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This.” And the article
is about a psychological study designed to create romantic love
in the laboratory, and my own experience
trying the study myself one night last summer.

00:32

So the procedure is fairly simple: two strangers take turns asking each other
36 increasingly personal questions and then they stare into each other’s eyes without speaking for four minutes.

00:35

So here are a couple of sample questions.

00:44

Number 12: If you could wake up tomorrow
having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?

00:50

Number 28: When did you last cry
in front of another person? By yourself?

00:52

As you can see, they really do
get more personal as they go along.

01:03

Number 30, I really like this one: Tell your partner
what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things you might not say
to someone you just met.

01:44

So when I first came across this study
a few years earlier, one detail really stuck out to me, and that was the rumor
that two of the participants had gotten married six months later, and they’d invited the entire lab
to the ceremony. So I was of course very skeptical about this process of just
manufacturing romantic love, but of course I was intrigued. And when I got the chance
to try this study myself, with someone I knew
but not particularly well, I wasn’t expecting to fall in love. But then we did, and –

01:47

(Laughter)

01:53

And I thought it made a good story,
so I sent it to the Modern Love column a few months later.

02:20

Now, this was published in January, and now it is August, so I’m guessing that some of you
are probably wondering, are we still together? And the reason I think
you might be wondering this is because I have been asked this question again and again and again
for the past seven months. And this question is really
what I want to talk about today. But let’s come back to it.

02:21

(Laughter)

03:00

So the week before the article came out, I was very nervous. I had been working
on a book about love stories for the past few years, so I had gotten used to writing
about my own experiences with romantic love on my blog. But a blog post might get
a couple hundred views at the most, and those were usually
just my Facebook friends, and I figured my article
in the New York Times would probably get a few thousand views. And that felt like a lot of attention on a relatively new relationship. But as it turned out, I had no idea.

03:39

So the article was published online on a Friday evening, and by Saturday, this had happened
to the traffic on my blog. And by Sunday, both the Today Show
and Good Morning America had called. Within a month, the article
would receive over 8 million views, and I was, to say the least, underprepared for this sort of attention. It’s one thing to work up
the confidence to write honestly about your experiences with love, but it is another thing to discover that your love life
has made international news –

03:42

(Laughter)

03:47

and to realize
that people across the world are genuinely invested
in the status of your new relationship.

03:52

(Laughter)

04:30

And when people called or emailed,
which they did every day for weeks, they always asked the same question first: are you guys still together? In fact, as I was preparing this talk, I did a quick search of my email inbox for the phrase “Are you still together?” and several messages
popped up immediately. They were from students and journalists and friendly strangers like this one. I did radio interviews and they asked. I even gave a talk, and one woman
shouted up to the stage, “Hey Mandy, where’