Mandy Len Catron
Appearances
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
No, not under any circumstances could I have possibly imagined any of it. Yeah. Really, I have heard from people all over the world since the article came out, especially in the first couple of years. Like I've gotten a significant number of emails from people who got married. Like I've had people send me their wedding photos.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
Yeah, I mean, and this was like, like Mark and I weren't married and I thought, oh, wow, like this is amazing. I don't know. I kind of think about it as something that exists apart from me. It came out at a time where a lot of people were dating online and there was this kind of craving for intimacy. I think online dating can feel... really dehumanizing at times.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
Like we're going down the checklist, we're objectifying one another and looking for somebody who meets these predetermined criteria. And this is kind of the opposite of that. And so I think it kind of struck a chord.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
To fall in love with anyone, do this. More than 20 years ago, the psychologist Arthur Aaron succeeded in making two strangers fall in love in his laboratory. Last summer, I applied his technique in my own life, which is how I found myself standing on a bridge at midnight, staring into a man's eyes for exactly four minutes. Let me explain.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
Earlier in the evening, that man had said, I suspect, given a few commonalities, you could fall in love with anyone. If so, how do you choose someone? He was a university acquaintance I occasionally ran into at the climbing gym and had thought, what if? I had gotten a glimpse into his days on Instagram, but this was the first time we had hung out one-on-one.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
Actually, psychologists have tried making people fall in love. I said, it's fascinating. I've always wanted to try it. I first read about the study when I was in the midst of a breakup. Each time I thought of leaving, my heart overruled my brain. I felt stuck. So, like a good academic, I turned to science, hoping there was a way to love smarter. I explain the study to my university acquaintance.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
A heterosexual man and woman enter the lab through separate doors. They sit face to face and answer a series of increasingly personal questions. Then they stare silently into each other's eyes for four minutes. The most tantalizing detail? Six months later, two participants were married. They invited the entire lab to the ceremony. Let's try it, he said.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
Let me acknowledge the ways our experiment already fails to line up with the study. First, we were in a bar, not a lab. Second, we weren't strangers. Not only that, but I see now that one neither suggests nor agrees to try an experiment designed to create romantic love if one isn't open to this happening. I googled Dr. Aaron's questions. There are 36. They begin innocuously.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
Would you like to be famous? When did you last sing to yourself or to someone else? But they quickly become probing. In response to the prompt, name three things you and your partner appear to have in common, he looked at me and said, I think we're both interested in each other. I grinned and gulped my beer as he listed two more commonalities I then promptly forgot.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
We exchanged stories about the last time we each cried and confessed the one thing we'd like to ask a fortune teller. We explained our relationships with our mothers. The questions reminded me of the infamous boiling frog experiment in which the frog doesn't feel the water getting hotter until it's too late.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
With us, because the level of vulnerability increased gradually, I didn't notice we had entered intimate territory until we were already there. I liked learning about myself through my answers, but I liked learning things about him even more. The bar, which was empty when we arrived, had filled up by the time we paused for a bathroom break.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
I sat alone at our table, aware of my surroundings for the first time in an hour, and wondered if anyone had been listening to our conversation. If they had, I hadn't noticed. And I did not notice as the crowd thinned and the night got late. We finished at midnight, taking far longer than the 90 minutes for the original study. Looking around the bar, I felt as if I had just woken up
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
That wasn't so bad, I said, definitely less uncomfortable than the staring into each other's eyes part would be. He hesitated and asked, do you think we should do that too? Here? I looked around the bar. It seemed too weird, too public. We could stand on the bridge, he said, turning toward the window. The night was warm and I was wide awake.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
We walked to the highest point, then turned to face each other. I fumbled with my phone as I set the timer. "'Okay,' I said, inhaling sharply. "'Okay,' he said, smiling." I've skied steep slopes and hung from a rock face by a short length of rope, but staring into someone's eyes for four silent minutes was one of the more thrilling and terrifying experiences of my life.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
I just like remember this moment of, oh no, I love him.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
I spent the first couple of minutes just trying to breathe properly. There was a lot of nervous smiling until, eventually, we settled in. I know the eyes are the window to the soul or whatever, but the real crux of the moment was not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
Once I embraced the terror of this realization and gave it time to subside, I arrived somewhere unexpected. I felt brave and in a state of wonder. Part of that wonder was at my own vulnerability, and part of it was the weird kind of wonder you get from saying a word over and over until it loses its meaning and becomes what it actually is, an assemblage of sounds.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
When the timer buzzed, I was surprised and a little relieved, but also I felt a sense of loss. Already I was beginning to see our evening through the surreal and unreliable lens of retrospect. Most of us think about love as something that happens to us. We fall, we get crushed. But what I like about this study is how it assumes that love is an action.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
It assumes that what matters to my partner matters to me because we have at least three things in common. Because we have close relationships with our mothers and because he let me look at him. I wondered what would come of our interaction. If nothing else, I thought it would make a good story. But I see now that the story isn't about us.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
It's about what it means to bother to know someone, which is really a story about what it means to be known. It's true you can't choose who loves you, although I've spent years hoping otherwise. And you can't create romantic feelings based on convenience alone. Science tells us biology matters. Our pheromones and hormones do a lot of work behind the scenes.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
But despite all this, I've begun to think love is a more pliable thing than we make it out to be. Arthur Aaron's study taught me that it's possible, simple even, to generate trust and intimacy, the feelings love needs to thrive. You're probably wondering if he and I fell in love. Well, we did.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
Although it's hard to credit the study entirely, it may have happened anyway, the study did give us a way into a relationship that feels deliberate. We spent weeks in the intimate space we created that night, waiting to see what it could become. Love didn't happen to us. We're in love because we each made the choice to be.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
Yeah, and it's probably been several years since I actually read it. I mean, much less read it aloud, but just read it at all. Yeah, it's really sweet. It is. Yes, it is. It's sweet. You know what? So Mark and I have been together for a little over 10 years. Wow. And back in August, I proposed to him.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
Yeah. So an interesting side effect of writing and researching about romantic love is that it really kind of put me off marriage as an institution. Like I'm not a huge fan for a variety of reasons that I won't get into here, but we had twins during the pandemic.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
So we have two three-year-olds and after the pandemic and then sort of being trapped at home with two newborns, which I found interesting. incredibly difficult and isolating and lonely, I really wanted to have a big party. Like I just had this overwhelming desire to have everyone I know and love in the same room. And the only way I could think of to make that happen was to have a wedding.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
And it turned out that he did want to get legally married. And so I thought, you know, I think if this is going to happen, I have to be the one to propose. And actually that was great. That felt really good to both of us. And yeah, I bought the ring. And then many weeks later, because we, you know, we have two toddlers, we like never go anywhere without them.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
And so we were, we had a babysitter and we were out to dinner at this nice restaurant. And I just sort of I'm a writer, so I wrote everything out in a card and I handed it to him. And then I had the ring in my pocket. And I think, yeah, he was very surprised.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
Yeah, I mean, part of how I feel about and part of why rereading the article seems very sweet to me is that we've been through a lot of kind of challenging things in our relationship. We struggled to get pregnant for a long, long time. That was really hard. Then they were in the NICU for... five weeks. And then we were kind of home with them alone because of the pandemic. It was just hard.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
Like there were a lot of hard years. And I just have this desire to sort of celebrate where we are because things feel a little more stable. And I think you only get so many opportunities to celebrate in life. I love that.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
Oh, yeah. I definitely think so. A lot of what I struggled with when I was dating was, like, anxiety over whether... The person I was interested in was interested in me. And I felt like this need to kind of control what was happening. And it felt very much out of my control. And there was something about doing the 36 questions that I just didn't feel that way. Like I really felt like...
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
I was excited to know this person. And if we became something more than friends, like if we started a relationship, that would be cool. But if we just stayed friends, that would also be cool. I was just very like open to possibility, which is like not how I move through the world usually. Yeah. I just trusted him and I liked him.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
And I think it's so rare that a romantic relationship starts with that kind of trust. And that has really carried us a long way, I would say.
The Daily
‘Modern Love’: How to Fall (and Stay) in Love
We spoke on the phone many times because I was very, very reluctant and very shy and not ready. So we had months and months of phone dates, and they were spectacular. We laughed. We had so much oxytocin flying through the air. It was just deliriously wonderful. And we fell in love and we're getting married this summer in our backyard.