George Vaillant’s 75-year Harvard Grant Study upholds that love is the secret to happiness.
Most of us will spend a lifetime searching for love in different forms – a soulmate, self-love, love for what we do – and if we actually find it, we’ll try to nurture and preserve it as best we can, hoping we never have to revert back to life without it. Knowing that love is everything, what if we could follow a formula for love that made the search for a soulmate a little easier?
Well, there may not be one single formula, but the following claims seem to be sure-fire ways of finding true love. Check them out below!
1. Dr. Arthur Aron’s 45-minute Love Experiment
Dr. Aron teaches in the Psychology Department at Stony Brook University, and focuses essentially on what causes people to form deep relationships with one another. In 1997, Aron and colleagues published a paper of an experiment in which they paired up participants and gave each pair 36 questions to ask each another over the course of 45 minutes. Both participants in a pair were made to answer each question, and at the end of the 45 minutes, some participants reported that they felt closer to their partner than before. Was it love?
A full list of the questions can be found here, but some of them include: Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die? When did you last sing to yourself? How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?
2. The 34-minute Love Experiment
The origins of this 3-step experiment are unclear, but it seems to be a variation of Aron’s love experiment study. It claims that these three steps will lead to falling in love:
(1) Find a complete stranger
(2) Spend half an hour revealing to one another intimate details about your lives
(3) Stare into each other’s eyes for four minutes without talking
3. eHarmony’s “How to Fall in Love on Purpose”
The online dating site eHarmony put up an article entitled “How to Fall in Love on Purpose.” The article cites Professor Aron’s research, but includes six additional steps you can take to fall in love on purpose. These include:
(1) Date people who genuinely want to fall in love
(2) Find out on the first date if the person is kind and intelligent
(3) Exude confidence
(4) See the person in his or her entirety and decide what he/she would bring to your life
(5) Express your attraction for the person to him/her
(6) Ignite the senses – talk softly, dress well, smell good, sit close to one another
4. The Loveumentary Blog’s Formula for Love
Melissa Joy Kong is one of the writers from the blog Loveumentary, whose mission is to document the greatest love stories from all over America. Kong claims to have come up with a formula for love by looking at three factors: Rightness, Sponginess, and Timing. After filtering each of these three and then adding them together, you get a Love Quotient of high, medium, or low. Hardships play a role in the intensity of your Love Quotient, but as Kong’s formula suggests, love is dependent upon a variety of factors and is the sum of its parts.
And just in case none of these is working for you… there’s always the 24-step guide to falling in love as told on an ink-filled napkin by second grade girls. Good luck!
