Christoph Lutz, an associate professor at Nordic Centre for Internet & Society. “Romantic relationships are very personal and private,” says Dr. Jennings cites this GQ article about gamified intimacy, which offers this: Oh, and they also may collect user data for monetization schemes to be named later. It turns out that there are lots of “relationship apps” that employ similar ideas about programmatic intimacy, as detailed in this Vox article by Rebecca Jennings: “There are now at least a dozen popular apps that cater exclusively to couples: Raft to sync schedules, Kindu for sex stuff, Honeydue for financial planning, Icebreak for conversation starters, You&Me to send messages, Fix a Fight for, well, fights, and Happy Couple, which gamifies getting to know each other.” Such apps schematically advise users about what to say to their partners and when to say it to sustain feelings of intimacy and connection. (Q: “What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?” A: “Drink Sangria in the park, and then later, when it gets dark, we go home.”) Does this mean I am a stranger to myself? I feel like I subsequently saw it framed somewhere as “take the intimacy challenge.” I asked myself the questions but couldn’t imagine not giving joke answers. When I read this I wondered why there wasn’t an app or a Facebook plug-in that could be set to trigger the irresistible intimacy protocol. She concludes that “that it’s possible - simple, even - to generate trust and intimacy, the feelings love needs to thrive.” She too ended up in a longer-term relationship with her experiment partner. Primed by the calibrated, programmatic sharing, Catron felt during the staring contest “not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me” - like a recursive reflection of a mirror in a mirror perhaps. These ramp up from “Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?” to “Share with your conversation partner an embarrassing moment in your life” to “Tell your partner something that you like about them already.” Then, after exchanging this information, you gaze into each other’s eyes for four minutes.

The method Catron chose for her Modern Love column involved sitting face-to-face with someone and taking turns answering a set of 36 personal questions. I imagine there were people who were already in relationships who participated in Aron’s studies, found themselves weirdly connecting to some random classmate, and then went home wondering if their whole life was a lie. If the emotional lives of study participants are thrown into a lasting epistemological quagmire, then so much the better! Very promising results. The fact that Aron’s procedures had lasting impact beyond the lab setting - one pair of experimental subjects fell in love and got married - didn’t deter Aron from recommending that the method be used in classroom settings. “Yes and no … It is useful as a means of creating a similar although not completely identical state, but under controlled conditions permitting experimental tests of causal hypotheses and theoretical issues.” What is love, anyway? Does anybody love anybody anyway? Manipulated independent variables, however - they are forever.

“Are we producing real closeness?” Aron asks in the general discussion section. If we can make people feel artificially terrible about themselves in a lab, why can’t we make them artificially intimate with a control-group subject? (The researchers behind the Facebook mood-manipulation study apparently had no such scruples, or perhaps they regarded all the relationships sustained by Facebook as essentially laboratory-created.)

But by taking two strangers and speeding them through a standardized falling-in-love algorithm, psychologists can supply themselves with intimacy in a petri dish, “opening up previously impractical research horizons.” He mentions lab-induced “self-esteem-lowering methods” as inspiration. A few years ago, this Modern Love column by Mandy Len Catron offered a step-by-step protocol for intimacy: It was titled, “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This.” The process was based on the work of psychologist Arthur Aron, who in this paper provides procedures for “the experimental generation of interpersonal closeness.” Aron’s aim was not to help people achieve intimacy rather it was to “make being in a relationship accessible to laboratory study and experimental manipulation.” Apparently it is hard to isolate the “independent variables” in those relationships that manage to begin without lab technicians’ intervention and supervision.

Jason catron vocal lab