When did you realize you were falling in love? The Modern Love podcast asked listeners this question, and the voice messages came pouring in. Listeners sent in stories that happened over dinner dates, on subway rides, while watching sunsets or at concerts. They described love at first sight, love built over time and much more. Today, we hear some of the most moving and surprising listener messages. Then, the Modern Love editor Daniel Jones discusses how we fall in love, and what the famous “36 Questions That Lead to Love” reveal about that process. And finally, Mandy Len Catron, the writer who popularized the 36 questions in her Modern Love essay, “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This," tells us whether she’s still in love with the same man 10 years later. For more Modern Love, search for the show wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Wednesday. Editors note: After this Modern Love episode was originally published, Mandy Len Catron got married. You can read about her wedding in the Vows section of the Times. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What is the purpose of the Modern Love podcast?
Hey, it's Michael. As you clearly know, here at The Daily, we cover the news, and there's a lot of it. But life is big, and we know that you look for meaning in all parts of your lives, not just the news, which is why for the next couple months, we're going to be sharing the work of some of our colleagues over at Modern Love.
If you don't know that show, every week host Anna Martin and that team explores the world of our relationships, how we fall in love, how we fall out of love, how we care for each other, how we contend with the moment when relationships hit rough patches.
They're stories inspired by the long-running NYT column called Modern Love, and we think it helps make sense of this other essential part of our lives. So, for the next few weeks, we hope you'll spend some time with these episodes on Sunday. They are great. And then we'll see you right back here on Monday morning for The Daily. Take a listen.
From the New York Times, I'm Anna Martin.
This is Modern Love.
Hi, Modern Love. Hello, Modern Love.
Hello, Modern Love. Hi. Hi.
My name is Nick.
My name's Ebony. I live in Austin, Texas. I live in Atlanta.
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Chapter 2: What are the listener's most memorable love stories?
I was working from home, and he was trying to get some sleep in my bed. And I just looked at him and thought, I love that man.
My head was on his chest and I could hear his heart beating. And I suddenly knew very, very surely that I needed to hear his heartbeat my whole life.
Frankly, there are no words. We talked for four hours. Seemed like four minutes. That was the moment I knew I was falling in love.
Honestly, we got so many messages from you that we can't possibly play them all here. But we did listen to every single one. And they just, they felt like fantasies. I felt like I was there with you, under the stars, at dinner, watching the sunset. Listener, let me tell you, romance is not dead.
He took me to an all-you-can-eat cheese and chocolate buffet. Honestly, it was just the way to my heart.
The moment that I knew that I was in love with her, that this was the most love I'd ever felt... She, without telling me, ordered beef tartare. And at this restaurant, it's like a pound of raw beef. And she proceeded to eat the whole thing in front of me. And my heart opened in ways that I did not know were possible. And this was love like I had never felt before. And I knew that I had fell hard.
He was sitting on the couch and he was like dusting his feet off before putting socks on. And yeah, I just knew in that moment for some reason.
Love can come in very unexpected times, but it's amazing.
It feels good. The first time I saw them, I actually thought I was in love with them.
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Chapter 3: How do the 36 Questions help in falling in love?
And it's something that I will treasure forever.
I could listen to these all day. I mean it. And we're going to play some more of your messages later in today's episode at the end. But before we get to those, your messages, your stories, they got the whole Modern Love team thinking. What does it actually mean to fall in love? This feeling so many of you described, the puzzle pieces, the warmth and comfort and feeling at home.
How do we get there? What makes us love each other? Today, we're going to spend some time on that exact question. Ten years ago, Modern Love published possibly the most iconic story of falling in love in the history of the column. It was in an essay called To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This by Mandy Lynn Catron.
In it, Mandy describes a list of 36 questions developed by a psychologist that are meant to help spark and deepen intimacy. What happened to Mandy after she used it reveals a lot about how we fall in love. So today, we're going to talk to Modern Love editor Daniel Jones about how people fall in love and the power of those 36 questions.
Then we'll hear the original essay from Mandy herself, and she'll tell us whether she's still in love with the same man she did the list with 10 years later. That's after the break. Stay with us. Daniel Jones, welcome to Modern Love It's good to be here So, Dan, today we're talking all about those singular moments that lead to falling in love. And I wonder if I could turn that to you.
Can you share a moment where you knew you were falling in love?
You know, I have been in love many times in my life, but it has never been a moment. It's always been a gradual getting to know a person and all of that. But... I did fall in love in a moment with a dog I was supposed to foster. It was a Puerto Rican mutt, and I agreed to foster him. And he was so sweet. And this couple came to sort of take him for a visit to their house and, like, test drive him.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, that was 14 years ago. You still have Rico, sweetest dog ever.
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Chapter 4: What was Mandy Len Catron's experience with the 36 Questions?
Yeah, because we fantasize about love. We have sort of a script in our mind about how it's going to work out. And the real consistent sort of love stories where people fall in love sort of in a moment is something that goes against that fantasy often. There's an essay called Learning to Silence My Inner Editor by Jesse Wren Marshall. And it's about this woman.
She's a New Yorker when all the guys she dates are like cynical and She goes off to a wedding and meets a guy from North Carolina. This is a column we published, who is just totally sincere and so sincere that she can't quite know what to make of him. But because it goes so against what she sort of schooled herself to believe in, in what works in a relationship, she just sort of melts into that.
I love that. It's those sort of surprising, you know, not what you expected stories that, I don't know, that just really get you and say something about how we don't, we aren't able to predict our lives. Like, stop trying to predict your life and like live out some fantasy. Like, look at what's in front of you.
Okay, so Dan, we wanted to have you on also to talk about what I think is fair to say is the most famous example of falling in love in the Modern Love Column's history, which is Mandy Lynn Catron's 2015 essay, To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This. And it's based on a list of 36 questions that have become incredibly well-known in their own right.
They're questions you're supposed to do with a partner, and supposedly doing them will lead you to to fall in love with each other. This is an essay that people have come back to over and over again, even now, even a decade after the essay was published. Can you remind us of the story behind this essay?
Yeah, yeah. So Mandy Lynn Catron wrote was studying love. She was like a student of love in school, like wanted to figure out how it worked and came across this sort of obscure, I think, study done by a psychologist named Arthur Aaron. And he'd come up with, and his team had come up with 36 questions that would sort of accelerate the process of falling in love.
And she thought this was interesting and decided to do it not with a total stranger, in the experiment they'd done it with total strangers, but someone who was almost a stranger, who was someone who was at her climbing gym and who she already had sort of feelings for. They went out, you know...
on their first date, went to a bar, started to ask each other these 36 questions, which are broken up into three sets of 12 questions. And they get increasingly deep and personal about your family, your worst childhood memory, your relationship with your mother. And they just talked for hours and got to know each other better. pretty well through that.
Mm-hmm.
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Chapter 5: What insights does Daniel Jones have about falling in love?
Yeah. I was like, so, yeah. I was really interested by the study, but it didn't feel like a story. It just felt like sort of a... An essay that was written too soon, in a way. So I just sort of flagged it as interesting, but didn't respond. And then a few months later, I got another email in my inbox from Mandy saying, And she said, well, guess what? The SSI has an ending now. We fell in love.
Wow. Her and the guy from the gym who she did the 36 question with, they fell in love.
And they didn't fall in love in the moment, but it sort of set the framework for them falling in love over time. And they did. And so I said, okay, well, this is an essay now. I didn't quite anticipate what the impact of that would be, that essay. And we worked on it, published it, along with the 36 questions as a sidebar.
And almost immediately, we started hearing stories of people trying these questions. Falling in love. Down the line, we heard about marriages. Marriage after marriage, a long-term relationship that started with these questions. People did documentaries where they would set up, you know, in a warehouse and film the whole thing of people asking each other the questions.
It just went on and on and on and went around the world. And, wow, it changed millions of lives. And there's no downside to asking people these questions and answering them. It sort of forces a vulnerability that can only be good. It can only be good and it can only get sort of deepen a relationship. You know, you don't have to fall in love.
Just to get to know another human being more deeply is sort of what we need in this world.
You know, I'm curious, just personally, what have these 36 questions taught you about falling in love? Hmm.
I don't know. I think about how it was constructed and the range of questions that it asks. And, you know, this popular conception of falling in love is sort of a floaty, light, sexy, romantic. And there is that part. And I think these questions can pull that part out. But I think the range of the question shows the range of what you need to reveal and feel to fall in love.
That it's not just complimenting each other. It's not just about how each other looks. It is those things, but it's a lot more than that. And it takes you all over the place to all corners of yourself and the other person and just keeps pushing and pushing and pushing. And that, I think, is what it reveals about what it takes to fall in love.
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Chapter 6: What is the impact of sharing personal stories about love?
Thank you, Anna. It was really good to be here again.
As Dan told us, Mandy Lynn Catron spent a long time wrestling with all these questions about love. She was trying to understand how to find love and how she would know when she found it. That's what led her to the 36 questions. And we do know that it worked. She did fall in love after doing them. But it's been 10 years since her essay was published. So the question now is, did she stay in love?
After the break, Mandy joins us to read her Modern Love essay. And she tells us what happened in the decades since she wrote it. Modern Love Mandy, Len, Katrin, welcome back to Modern Love. Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here. Mandy, on today's episode, we're talking all about the process of falling in love, how it happens, what it takes, what it feels like.
And you, of course, probably have the most well-known story of falling in love to ever appear in the Modern Love column. I wonder, when you first decided to do these 36 questions with a man you did know, but you didn't know super well, a man named Mark, could you possibly have imagined what that moment was going to lead to in your life and in the world?
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.
Oh my God, my heart is kind of melting at that. That's incredible.
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.
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.
I mean, it really, really did. You know, Mandy, I have so many more questions about the questions and about your own love story. But before we get too far into that, I would love to hear you read your essay. Okay, sure.
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