Thought provoking essay collection! Wide ranging and introspective. Catron's ability to weave memoir with research and literary allusions is impressive. I just wish the personal bits were a bit more in depth.

In 2015, Mandy Len Catron took a gamble.

She submitted an essay to “Modern Love,” the popular column that runs Sundays in The New York Times.

Her submission, “To Fall In Love With Anyone, Do This,” proposed a series of 36 intimate questions, based on a study by social psychologist Arthur Aron and his wife, Dr. Elaine Aron, who attempted to recreate the experience of romantic love in a lab.

Len Catron’s essay was published — then became a viral sensation. It was among The New York Times’ most-read stories of 2015.

Why was Len Catron’s essay such a hit with readers? The title had something to do with it.

In an age when online dating sites and mobile apps promise love with a click or a swipe-right, the possibility of falling in love with anyone just by answering a series of questions probably seemed too good to be true.

In Len Catron’s book, she details that the Arons’ study went something along these lines:

“A heterosexual man and a woman entered the lab through separate doors, each was told that the other was excited to meet him or her. Once inside, they sat face-to-face and spent the next 90 minutes asking each other a series of increasingly personal questions. Afterward, they stared into one another’s eyes, without speaking, for four minutes.”

Len Catron writes how the study gave her another view of love, one that perhaps gave her the ability to view it as an “ordinary thing” as opposed to filling us with anxiety, thinking that perhaps we aren’t good enough or special enough to deserve it.

She goes on to add that the relationship with her current partner Mark was not a romantic one when they tried the 36 questions. They were sitting at a noisy bar, taking turns on her iPhone back and forth to ask and answer them.

Although she admits to being attracted to Mark, she was dating someone else at the time, and she didn’t know if that relationship really had a future. One of the questions posed in the Arons’ questionnaire was: “Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how she or he might handle it.”

Len Catron told Mark about her doubts regarding her relationship, and she confessed to “searching his face for signs of interest or disappointment.”

Staring into your partner’s eyes in complete silence, for four minutes, often poses the biggest issue.

For Len Catron, having this experience with Mark was a revelation. “I know the eyes are supposedly the windows to the soul,” she states in the book. “But the real crux of this moment, should you ever find yourself trying it, is not simply that you are seeing someone, but that you are seeing someone seeing you.”

For “Modern Love” editor Daniel Jones, Len Catron’s essay stood out among other submissions for several reasons.

“I loved the playfulness and integrity of Mandy’s essay,” Jones said in an email. “Everyone likes to think there’s a better way to find love, a ‘system’ that will work. In this case, that system is turning mutual vulnerability into a game. It’s not a gimmick, though. It’s deep and thought-provoking.

“Whether it leads to love or simply a deeper understanding of another person, the 36 questions work because they force each person to be equally vulnerable.”

In “How to Fall in Love with Anyone,” Len Catron gives readers a more profound analysis on relationships.

Over the phone from her home in Vancouver, where she teaches English and creative writing at the University of British Columbia, she answered our questions about love and how to find it.

Why the 36 questions?

I read about this study of the 36 questions years before, and … the experience was interesting to me, it just felt meaningful and valuable.

When did you start writing this book?

I came up with the idea for this book many years ago. My parents got divorced when I was 26 (I’m 36 now), and I really had a hard time dealing with their divorce; it just felt to me felt like someone had died. I felt an immense amount of grief, and that our family had changed, and just this feeling of loss.

Because I’m a writer, I wanted to understand why my parents’ divorce was so difficult for our family and for me in particular. One of the things that I realized was that what I thought I understood about love, was not really true or reliable. My parents’ divorce prompted me to question this idea that I had that if you love someone, and you’re a good person and you stay faithful to them, and you don’t betray them in any way, then the marriage will work and everything will be easy, and you’ll always love them.

I was also in a long-term relationship at the time that was difficult in many ways, and I suddenly realized that I didn’t know very much about love. I teach students how to do research papers all the time, so I thought, “well, I just need to research this,” and that’s what I did because I felt it was a big enough topic to write a book about.

Which five of the 36 questions do you consider to be the most revealing?

The most important questions (or prompts) are the ones where you have to say something nice about your partner, compliment your partner. I am fairly comfortable talking about myself so those didn’t feel very challenging to me. But having to compliment my partner made me feel very vulnerable.

I think that’s such an important part of the process of the questions, because I don’t think we thoughtfully compliment one another very often, and just say something nice and specific and thoughtful. And you have to do it a few times, you can’t just say, “Oh, you have a cool shirt on,” because I think that would feel very disingenuous. I didn’t know the person I was doing it with very well, and I must admit I felt a little squirmy (giving him a compliment), and that was good because part of the goal is to create intimacy.

There’s so much research suggesting that intimacy and trust is linked to kindness, and happy relationships are very much connected to the partners’ ability to be kind to one another. I think building that from the very beginning, from the night we did those questions, I felt like he noticed me, and he thought I was interesting. He had to be explicit about that, and I had to do the same for him; I think that created a sense of trust and confidence.

Do you think that’s why the questions work or at least touch a nerve, because they manage to expose that vulnerability?

Yeah, absolutely. I think that they do work and help people feel a sense of closeness and feel connected. If you look at the psychology literature (about the study), the goal isn’t necessarily to make people fall in love. They use these questions in all kinds of different studies, for example, between people of different ethnic groups. It’s consistent that they can create an accelerated sense of closeness.

In the book, you focus on two important relationships: your past, very complicated one with your ex-boyfriend Kevin and your current relationship with Mark, who you tried the 36 questions with. Do you think the questions made the relationship with Mark different?

The relationship with Kevin was my first serious relationship, and it lasted on and off for about a decade. I think one of the things I mention in the book is that we became adults together, so I think there’s growth and learning that happened in that relationship, and because of that relationship.

But it was limiting, and in many ways, I feel I changed so much once I got out of it. I figured out all by myself who I wanted to be as an adult and who I wanted to be in the world, and that was really liberating.

When I was in my 20s, I wanted the validation of being loved by someone who I thought was smart and interesting and adventurous, all these things I aspired to be. I thought that if people saw me as part of this couple, then they would think that I was funny and adventurous, too. In the relationship with Kevin I sought so much validation, whereas in my relationship with Mark I don’t do that, or at least not nearly as much, because I think we all do that a little bit.

I feel that I figured out something about who I was before I met Mark, and there’s space within the relationship to continue figuring that out.

A big part is also that I know he’s a really kind, generous and thoughtful person. I don’t want to use our relationship for a model of how people should approach love, because who knows what will happen in the future, but I did go into it with all this knowledge about love, having done all this research and a clear sense of the kind of partner that I wanted and the kind of qualities in a human being that make a good partner.

So, if you want to sum it up, it’s two things: kindness and generosity.

Overall, what have you learned about relationships from the questions, writing the book, and your own experiences in love?

I think the main thing is that there are so many ways to make a life, and so many roles that love can have in it. I do think romantic love is an important part of our life, but so are all our various other loving relationships, or at least that’s true in my own experience.

There are so many ways that love can work, and the feeling that it left me with is that I’ll be okay with whatever happens.

Something that our love stories often do is make us think there’s only one way to have a good life, and that if we can’t make that happen somehow, we’ve failed, or that our life is less meaningful or valuable, and that is such a shame. I think my personal takeaway, is that life will be good whatever role love plays in it which is such a nice thing to know, because it really takes all the anxiety out of love.

What other advice do you have for people looking for love?

One of the things that I talk about is that there are more diverse narratives of love… there are so many ways to experience love, from consensual non-monogamy, to relationships that are short but meaningful, to transitioning from marriage to friendship.

I think my personal takeaway, is that life will be good whatever role love plays in it, which is such a nice thing to know, because it really takes all the anxiety out of love.

The way to be happy is not necessarily to try to fit your life into a love story, but rather to make love fit into your own life and your own experiences. It’s empowering to be intentional in love, there’s something really liberating about that.

Want the 36 questions?

Read the book or get the app

Mandy Len Catron’s “Modern Love” column listing 36 questions that could make strangers fall in love with each other went viral in 2015.

So many people read and shared this column, editors of The New York Times calculated that the equivalent of 100 years was spent reading it.

Len Catron’s new book “How to Fall in Love with Anyone” (Simon & Schuster, $26) tells of her many years writing about love and her own experience of how she fell in love with her current partner.

What questions should you ask to fall in love?

Can intimacy between two strangers be accelerated by having them ask each other a specific series of personal questions? The idea is that mutual vulnerability fosters closeness.

You can try it out using The New York Times free mobile app, designed in consultation with Arthur Aron, the lead author of the study that Mandy Len Catron wrote her “Modern Love” column and new book about. Visit nytimes.com/36q on your phone or tablet to get started. You’ll want a partner (friend, lover or stranger) and about 50 minutes.

Here are five of the questions, to give you an idea:

What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?

What do you value most in a friendship?

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

What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?

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?

I loved this Novel. Face paced Could not put down

Love is love. We fantasize about love, we would believe that love is perfect and that the happy every after we see after a romantic cartoon or a movie will end well and that our relationship will be the best one, and no one, time, expectations and our personal growth can kill it.
My parents have been married for 60 years and 9 months and something. Then dad died last Nov 2.
And for mom is hard obviously.
Personally I am still single because I idealize love a lot giving to it expectations and perfection. I grew up with the movie by Norah Ephron and it says a lot. My favorite one is When Harry met Sally but also Sleepless in Seattle, You've got Mail are fantastic and I remain of the idea that although the most recent cynical pieces regarding When Harry met Sally, these love are not impossible. Nora Ephron was romantic in her screenplays but also pretty connected with the reality.


A long premise, because it was pretty interesting to read How to fall in love with anyone by Mandy Len Catron. Mandy was selected, chosen by the New York Times section Modern Love with the article: "To fall in love with anyone, Do This," one of the most clicked articles of 2015 with millions of visualizations in the world. After this beautiful experience the idea of writing a book in essays about love and what it is love.

But the book by Mandy wants to be to her also a self-therapy for the traumatic experience lived by her once their parents decided to split up after a long marriage. The author remembers the perfection of this love-story she loved to tell to anyone. His dad was the coach, her mom the reporter of the school magazine. They fell in love during an interview. A never-ending love. Their parents wouldn't never increased the sad percentage of divorced couples because her parents were perfect, their love perfect, their times perfect.

Unfortunately when their fairy-tale ended Mandy felt a lot of sadness and I think also the incapacity of sorting out this loss. Because a dying love means a loss and if we want the failure of a couple and more of a life-project. Mandy felt all of it and started to read compulsively books and magazines about love.
Mandy didn't accept any new start of her parents too devastated for what happened to them: her dream of a perfect world where harmony would have reigned forever was broken and although time passed by this situation was lived by her with great internal conflict.

At the same time we will also follow Mandy and her love-story for Kevin, long ten years. A love-story of habits, of expectations, but also radical differences.
We will see thanks to her the online dating communities. We will discover the new phase she lived as single, and then the re-discovery of love.

We will see how Hollywood lives love now.
Love is not anymore analyzed at the beginning the most beautiful phase, but in its pains, sufferance, maturity, problematic that there are in a couple. The first meeting is not anymore important to Hollywood and Nora Ephron is dead as well...

Intelligent book, sad because of course the author would have wanted a different end, but sometimes a terrible end is the beginning of something else.

Like this book is! A bad experience brought to Mandy notoriety, the possibility of sharing in a lot of prestigious places her thoughts and this one is positive and it will be a great new start to her.

Highly recommended.

I thank NetGalley and Simon&Schuster for this eBook.

This book is a refreshing and important read. I think it is a must read for every single person, it's an especially important read for women. I love the content, it gave me so much to think about.

I had this book for a week and recommended it to more than 10 people before I had even finished it, which I think should be enough to convince you to <strong>add it to your To-Read list immediately</strong>! I knew about Mandy Len Catron from her 2015 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/fashion/modern-love-to-fall-in-love-with-anyone-do-this.html?mcubz=2">viral piece</a> in the "Modern Love" section of <em>The New York Times. </em>I loved the article -- I forced my friends to do the first chunk of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/fashion/no-37-big-wedding-or-small.html?mcubz=2">the 36 questions</a> with each other during the first night of a trip when they all met for the first time. While Catron's pieces for the <em>Times</em> are fantastic, this book is something else.<strong> It's a better version of Aziz Ansari's <em><a href="https://girlwithabookblog.com/2015/07/15/modern-romance-by-aziz-ansari-and-eric-klinenberg/">Modern Romance</a></em> and a more personal version of Moira Weigel's <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1641580599?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1"><em>Labor of Love</em></a>. </strong>

<strong><em>How to Fall in Love with Anyone</em> details how the author has mythologized her parents' and grandparents' love stories and the effect that has had upon her own conceptualization and approaches to romantic love.</strong> She spends a chapter detailing the <strong>cultural scripts</strong> that Western culture passes down about love through romantic comedies or through what we're told embodies a "good relationship", who even "deserves" a "good relationship," and discusses that while we're told what the best end product is, we aren't often taught about how to love others well. In fact, I think this book could be more aptly titled <em>How to Love Better</em>, in order to better convey its contents and to be more alluring than the current title. <strong>The book made me think a lot about how we could all be better to each other, if we all decided to value loving better more often. </strong>

The author devotes multiple chapters to the love stories of her family, all situated within Appalachia, and details how the relationships allowed individuals to move beyond the circumstances they inherited. <strong>She contrasts these love stories with her own ten year relationship</strong>, which made me feel kind of queasy, simply because I identified with spending too much time in a relationship that slowly fizzled, unbeknownst to the couple, until its pulse flatlined.

<strong>Eventually the book shifts into describing the relationships Catron enters after her first big relationship</strong>, including the one detailed in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/fashion/modern-love-to-fall-in-love-with-anyone-do-this.html?mcubz=2">her viral Modern Romance piece</a>. This reminds me of something I made my boyfriend do on one of our first dates, where we played a question asking game that encourage medium-to-deep conversations instead of the polite, small talk that often occurs. I don't remember the questions or the answers now, but I do remember the feeling of sharing a deeper version of myself than is traditionally expected on these early dates when I would try to present the shiniest version of myself. <strong>This book magically captures all of those feelings that I've felt and I loved LOVED loved reading while Catron ruminated on love. </strong>

That was easy to do because <strong>Catron spins many pretty phrases</strong>, as you'll see in the quotes that I've included at the end of my post. While I'm loaning this book out to a few friends (to underline their own favorite quotes), I've told them all that I want this book to be on <strong>my forever bookshelf (aka the highest honor I can bestow upon a book)</strong> so it absolutely must be returned to me.

Unfortunately, the book doesn't include Catron's latest <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/style/modern-love-to-stay-in-love-sign-on-the-dotted-line-36-questions.html?mcubz=2">piece</a> for "Modern Love," though she alludes to some of the content in the book. I've <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/style/modern-love-to-stay-in-love-sign-on-the-dotted-line-36-questions.html?mcubz=2">linked</a> to it because I feel like it's worth reading too. <strong>Read all of her things -- each of them are special and wonderful and will sift through your mind for days. </strong>


<em>"I think of the four of us as subject to the same flash flood, all senselessly bailing water into our own boats in hopes the others might end up on dry land."</em> (p. 122)

<em>"Our views of love -- what we want from it, what we think it should feel like -- are rooted in the context of our lives."</em> (p. 72)

<em>"But now I understand that there are always two breakups: the public one and the private one. Both are real, but one is sensible and the other is ugly. Too ugly to share in cafés. Too ugly, I sometimes think, to even write."</em> (p. 134)

<em>"I didn't know what was real and what was scripted."</em> (p. 16)

<em>"Nothing was funny, really, but we couldn't stop laughing the manic laughter of people who know it will be a while before they hear themselves laugh again."</em> (p. 40)

<em>Disclaimer: I was provided with physical and digital copies of this book for free from Simon & Schuster. All opinions expressed in the review are my own and have not been influenced by Simon & Schuster.</em>

For more reviews, check out www.girlwithabookblog.com!

This is a lovely meander through love, relationships and dating. The author takes us back to her grandparents and their courtship, her parents and how they met, and a selection of her own relationship. The tales are told alongside scientific studies, anecdotes and other fascinating information about love, marriage and life.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in love and relationships and the stories and science behind it all.

I really enjoyed the original Modern Love column, but the topic didn't hold enough interest for me to finish the whole book.

This book is going to stick with me for a while. I guess when I first started reading I didn't read the subtitle; I thought it would be more of a "how to" or an advice book instead of a collection of stories about the author's life/love journey. Still, something about the writing style and author's voice kept me reading. She has some good questions to ponder about love and how it works and why it lasts or doesn't last. Questions that challenge previous conceptions about the topic. Some things I agree with, others I don't. The big takeaway for me (something I already know, but this was a good reminder) is that love is intentional. You can choose to be with someone or you can choose not to. But part of making a relationship work is being willing/choosing to be in it, regardless of what the other person chooses to do.

The part the most interested me was Dr. Arthur Aron's experiment to get people to fall in love. Two people enter room, sit at a table, and alternate asking 36 questions (each answering each question) which increase in intimacy. At the end, they stare into each other's eyes for four minutes without saying anything. The end result for the original people= six months later, they got married.

**Edit: Review will be published to blog on 25 Jun 2017 at 10:00AM EST**

I chose this book because:

How wonderful would it be if everywhere you looked, you saw love? I have not read the New York Times essay, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This,” but if it was published in the New York Times, then it must be good, right? After reading a bunch of mysteries and thrillers that were very plot-driven, I wanted to read something more emotional, and this book seems like it fits the bill.

Upon reading it:

Despite writing down why I chose this book before starting the book, I can’t remember what I was looking for. What answer was I hoping to find? Whatever it was, what I found wasn’t what I expected. I didn’t expect such a logical and scientific approach to love, and I mean more than just psychology. This approach to love reminded me of my newfound approach to language when I took my first linguistics course. Fascinating. I often associate love and language with emotions, so to break them down to a science was a refreshing perspective that opened my mind to more ways of critical thinking.

Maybe this scientific/logical/analytic approach really suited me. I have never felt deeply. I have never loved deeply. I’m the kind of person who if you asked for love advice from, I’d probably say, “You should just break up.” On the other hand, Catron has given the topic of love some intense thought, and it seems like she was interested in love stories ever since she was little. Of course when I was a little girl I had my fun with fairytales, but otherwise, I had never given love very much thought.

Whilst reading about love, sometimes I found myself thinking that I needed to think less about it. As an introvert who lives in her head more often than she’d like, I could certainly do with less thinking in life in general (I mean, social/emotional thinking; I welcome as much academic thinking as I can bear and more). But anyways, I found myself thinking that I should think less about love because I was skeptical. For all the scientific analysis in the world, love is a mystery. So what’s the point of dwelling? But even this perspective of love was touched upon in her essays. That, and so many more—all the back and forth and in between, the jumble and mess about love that I never bothered to sort through because I figured I’d wait until whenever I finally fell in love to sort it out.

Catron is so honest and vulnerable in her essays; how can I say that there is anything wrong about them? But more than that, she was thorough with her research, research that felt like stemmed from more than just curiosity but maybe a need, a need to figure out love, this thing that had and has been so important to her from childhood into adulthood, this thing that had, has, and is probably important to many of us as well.

My favourite essay of the collection was “If You Can Fall in Love with Anyone, How Do You Choose?” This essay is a sort of extension of her viral essay “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This,” the one that was published in the New York Times, which had a 1500 word limit. Both “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This” and Arthur Aron’s infamous 36 questions are included at the end of this collection.

In January of 2015, Mandy Len Catron published an essay entitled "To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This" in the New York Times Modern Love column, and it went about as viral as you can get. The essay was based on her fascinating experience using 36 increasingly personal questions from a study done by psychologists over 20 years ago to make two strangers fall in love in a lab. The wild success of that essay led to this book, but what gives this book merit apart from her essay is that she'd already been researching and writing on the topic for years. In this memoir, she effortlessly balances her own history and questions about love with the research and findings of others as well. As a thirty-something, her essays are thoroughly relevant to the new and unique challenges of falling in love in 2017 while also being respectful of the timelessness of this topic. She covers age-old questions about how to fall in love, how to stay in love, what love really means, and whether there even are any answers at all. With approachable and engaging writing, this is a great read for anyone who's ever had one of those conversations over coffee with a friend or loved one asking all the big questions about love and wondering if they're the only ones.

A knockout, and applicable to any close relationship! Can't wait to try the list with my partner!!

I didn't finish this book. It made me sad, and I was expecting it to be a lighter read. I was expecting encouraging tips along the lines of The Happiness Project. I felt the author spent a lot of time discussing the dysfunction of her relationships, instead.

Enjoyed author being so honest about her relationships and her struggle with love. Fun book

I loved this book. It's partly a memoir about the author's formative experiences with love, as well as the family stories about love that she grew up on, and partly a sociological and psychological analysis of modern love, how it has evolved over time and where we are now. It's fascinating, insightful, charming and sweet all at once. I highly recommend this book.