The “36 questions that lead to love” were originally 40 questions and different | Hacker News Reader

The “36 questions that lead to love” were originally 40 questions and different

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198 pointsswyx66 comments

Last year, I came up with my own "Completely Scientific, 100% Accurate Compatibility Survey" which aimed to make first dates more fun than you get by asking the same old introductory questions (eg "6. What's a movie that you're at least a little bit embarrassed to admit you like?" and "4. Pete Davidson: Hot or Not?"). It also allowed me to ask a bunch of questions that could be weird to ask in a different context that I can glean a lot of useful info from (eg "7. What is one thing you want to do in the local area that you haven't done yet?" and "2. What are your favorite cuisines (up to three)?").

Only got to use it once though. She agreed to a second date, then cancelled last minute and ghosted me. So, IDK, maybe don't try this.

The point of these questions isn't the content of the questions themselves, it's the increasing level of intimacy. Just like kissing isn't about the utility of putting your tongue in someone else's mouth.

I probably don't care what a stranger's guilty pleasure is, but being let in to that private part of their life is a big part of what makes dating feels special.

I think folks prefer to talk about themselves naturally rather than answer pre-scripted shallow end questions.

Honesty I might even get bored and bail on the date if it'd been a reasonable amount of time (1+ hour) to know it wasn't going anywhere beyond a me pub quiz. There's an entire world going on in here, stop gleaning useful information and start conversing! I'm not an NPC and this ain't a dialogue tree!

The picture in my head is that you're running through the questions without injecting any real conversation in there so I could be way off. I'm also imagining they left not knowing a thing about you haha

Tbh a "hot or not" question would be the end of the date for me mentally anyway unless things really picked up from there. Reducing an entire person to a boolean is unstimulating and kinda gross lol. I think you need to at least A/B test the questions.

> Tbh a "hot or not" question would be the end of the date for me mentally anyway

I think that’s fair because that’s a filter in an of itself. For me personally I’d be happy to chat about whether I find a celebrity hot, it feels like a useful question in establishing things like jealousy levels.

But I do think you’re right in that it’s all about “the vibe”, you should know how that question is going to be received before you ask it.

Oh absolutely, on a meta level the quiz worked perfectly for me in 4 questions.

As the parent comment only used it once though I imagine fail fast isn't the methodology they were going for

"She agreed to a second date, then cancelled last minute and ghosted me."

This being HN, I knew this phrase would be included somewhere in this thread before I even opened it...

Wait are we reading about “the 36 questions that lead to love” or “the 36 questions that lead to loving where you work”?

Do my manager and I have to stare silently into each other’s eyes for 3 minutes?

Only if you want to get intimate with HR...

Needs more field testing for it to be scientific, don't give up!

> ghosted me

Hopefully it achieved it’s purpose. Otherwise you found a false negative.

Unfortunately, my ”methodology” produced similar results in 2022.

> Only got to use it once though.

Expected the next sentence to state that you were now married, hence the "single-use".

Sounds great fun even for couples, where’s the repo!

I wanna know the rest of the survey questions!

My wife had been a serial monogamist and had her time taken up by men who lied to her about their intentions. She had been engaged the majority of from 18-26 or so.

By the time she met me she was frustrated about men wasting her time but having no intention of actually settling down and having kids, and so the entire first date conversation revolved around parenting style, I said that I wanted a wife smart enough to work but who wanted to stay at home with our children, our philosophy on child discipline, basically everything about our future lives. It was an interrogation, but a fun one.

She got a lot of blowback from friends who thought this strategy was terrible and she’d “scare men away”. Which yeah, she scared away the men who didn’t want kids or who were on the fence about it.

We knew another woman who got pregnant and then married a guy and they seemed absolutely miserable. Why not just be honest about what you want? Interestingly, if you explicitly say “I want to get married and have kids, if you’re not interested don’t waste my time”, people won’t waste your time.

Even still it took her like 40 first dates over the course of a year to finally meet me, a guy who was totally on board with it. We got married six months later, and have two kids now.

> Why not just be honest about what you want?

I've encountered two significant reasons:

1) You don't know what you want

2) What you want is not kosher in your culture so you'll settle for eating dirt

3. Some amount of people don’t want to feel like the dating process is an interview process, of attempting to insert a “bum” into a “seat”, of finding a “candidate” to fill a “role”. Of course that doesn’t stop it from still _being that_, it’s just that some people are fully comfortable with an upfront, obvious and formal selection process, but many people are not, and want the process to have some amount of an “organic” feel to it.

As with anything with dating, since you have no idea of what a new person’s criteria is, and they may not know either, and since there’s often a certain poker game involved in revealing those intentions, most people seem to opt for feeling it out as they go along. Honestly I think this is fine, it’s just that you have to give each other enough time and space for that, and that’s often a problem

it depends how we meet. if i meet someone through a dating site or some other matchmaking process, i would want to known soon whether we have similar goals in life. and if the goals line up we can go deeper and explore our relationship. if not, we can keep looking for someone else.

but i actually feel that dating itself is not a good approach to find a partner. it is an artificial situation disconnected from your normal life.

it would be better to be able to pick your partner from among your friends, and then spending time with that friend and others as you get to know each other more. many qualities, interests and goals will naturally reveal themselves and common interests and goals will cause you to spend more time together.

dating makes this difficult because you are switching from relaxed activities with friends to a very formal meeting with high expectations where not getting invited for a second date counts as a failure without much hope for another chance.

To expand on 1, it does not have to mean that one has not thought about the subject. It can also mean that one has thought about the subject in depth but has either reached a dead end or has reached a undesirable answer.

Since this is about kids, plenty of people would desire having children from an emotional POV, yet would find it a bad choice for various rational reasons. Such people are in a deadlock and to an outsider would appear as not know what they want.

Guys, guys... I know it's slightly corny but the best advice is just to be yourself and let the conversation flow. Stop bringing tech interview style approaches into it, just chat!

“local lottery winner says, just buy a ticket! its that easy!”.

All jokes aside, many people struggle with charisma and keeping the conversation going. I have grown to be more charismatic with age, largely due to a mix of assertiveness training and having internal rules to keep the conversation flowing.

If you can paper over the awkwardness of transitioning from an answer to one question to asking another question, and you are genuinely inquisitive so as to make a whole conversation from an answer, then these kinds of questions are a fantastic crutch.

Other conversational crutches like the “FORD model” (Family, Occupation, Recreation and Dreams) can help in the event of a stalled conversation.

> assertiveness training and having internal rules to keep the conversation flowing

Could you elaborate on that? These internal rules sound intriguing and potentially helpful for other people struggling with charisma

It’s only like an interview if you make it like that. These types of questions are incredibly useful if you’re both a bit nervous or both naturally not very chatty. The idea isn’t that you run through every question in order, get an answer or discuss and move on, the idea is to use them as interesting questions to get you going which then easily leads onto further conversation. It’s a bit of fun. People aren’t using these things to conduct interviews!

My wife actually use some ‘30 questions to fall in love’ site on our second date. It worked out pretty well I suppose .

Imagine dating someone who can't invert a binary tree on a whiteboard.

My last date could invert the binary tree, but with horrendous time complexity (O(n.log(n))).

At that point I knew it wouldn't work out between the two of us so I just got up and left the restaurant. I emailed her the solution later because I'm not an inconsiderate human being.

Imagine dating someone who doesn't even keep snus in their EPA? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hdUKZLQIuQ

Happily married for 5 years. But if I had to do it all over again, would require partner to be able to invert a binary tree.

Look through the questions. A lot of them are things that will already come up in the course of a relationship. The difference is that you're asking them upfront. There's nothing particularly special about them. The core point is just opening up and being vulnerable with the other person far earlier than you otherwise might and based on personal experience, I think it can work extremely well. I'm neurotic, so the relationships didn't end up going anywhere, but still.

This is terrible advice, because if being yourself led to conversation flow and that led to connection then the person asking wouldn't need the advice.

> the best advice is just to be yourself and let the conversation flow

This is the key to success but it isn't good advice.

> just be yourself

Unless you suffer from schizofrenia, you can't not be yourself. I am sure you mean well but this often repeated piece of advice is meaningless.

It’s quite common for people in dating situations to try and second guess what good dating behaviour would be. They try to project a character or personality that they think will be attractive, rather than behaving as they normally would around friends or family. Also they might answer questions disingenuously in order to project a false image of themselves. The advice to just be yourself is really just saying, don’t do that. Be more honest.

Those people are just being themselves. What are you are suggesting them to do is precisely doing something else than what they naturally do.

There are people naturally good at social interactions and people who are bad at it. People who are good look at the ones who aren't and see them doing dumb, self-sabotaging mistakes that _they_ wouldn't do. The successful wouldn't act that way so they recommend the lesser fortunate to "just be themselves" assuming that everybody acts the same in their natural state, while in reality they should be recommending "just act like me".

The people bad at social interactions already act like themselves, by definition, and any sort of actionable advice that would improve their situation literally means to act less like oneself and more like someone else.

> Those people are just being themselves.

That’s technically true but in practice useless. Nobody knows how to do almost anything ‘naturally’ in the sense you’re using the word because we have learned to do practically everything. Yes I know there’s nature versus nurture, and innate nature is a thing, but in practice our social interactions are very largely learned.

Do you think it’s possible for people to learn and change? What you are arguing is that what that person learned up until then is the real ‘natural’ them and anything they learn after is somehow unnatural. Do I even need to take that line of reasoning any further?

> Do you think it’s possible for people to learn and change?

Yes, if they get actionable advice, which they can understand and follow, which "just be yourself" is not an example of. It's not just useless advice, it's wrong, showing a fundamental misunderstanding by the advisor of what the problem with the advised person is. It's not only frustrating, but it causes the advised person to dismiss any further advice from the advisor.

I think by itself you're right, it's ambiguous and dismissive. I think the basic idea behind it, trying to be more relaxed and comfortable in that situation to express more of your genuine personality than a special behaviour you adopt for dating situations, is on the right track though.

Now I'm curious to see the same experiment stopping with the 3 minutes of eye contact as a control. Maybe that's all it takes.

You can cause pets like rabbits to bond by putting them in a bathtub together and putting food in their fur so they groom each other. Might work.

That's an extremely long time for eye contact. I bet you could get that time down too.

The NYT article that is the context for these tweets quotes the author of the column which reported on this research (so indirect, lol) as disagreeing, FWIW: > The final task Ms. Catron and her friend try — staring into each other’s eyes for four minutes — is less well documented, with the suggested duration ranging from two minutes to four. But Ms. Catron was unequivocal in her recommendation. “Two minutes is just enough to be terrified,” she told me. “Four really goes somewhere.”

I went through a similar set of questions on a second date. We have now been happily married for almost 5 years and have a 1.5 year old. I guess it worked pretty well!

If a woman agrees to do this with you on a second date, she must already have a strong interest, otherwise she would find it too overbearing. Anyway, I'm happy for you.

Hmm, not sure I agree with that. Some questions may be a bit heavy for a first date and some are perfectly reasonable. You would need to use your judgement and see what feels acceptable for the situation :)

The question content isn't the issue, the interrogation style of date would be the issue.

I can't imagine anything more boring personally! Am I at least allowed to read my book while we go through the list?

Having said that I'd also walk away from a job interview that was in a similar style, so maybe it works on a next level meta. We are incompatible because you brought a quiz to a date and I found it boring, the quiz was a success.

It's not intended as some kind of compatibility survey. The way it's supposed to work is both people answer all the questions – as opposed to one person asking the other personal all of them. You're also supposed to stare into each other's eyes during the whole thing. The point is to create a sense of shared vulnerability by both "forcing" both people to talk about things they wouldn't normally talk about and also by "forcing" intimacy into the space.

I understood the article :P

I'm saying the act of doing that would be (for me) boring, dull, unimaginative, lame, a bad date, Yawnfest 2023, the next stop is Snore Central where this train terminates.

As the parent of the comment I responded to says - if you and your date are willing to do this together you're already pretty compatible.

I realise the quiz questions are not to do that. I get it, promise! The reason you are on a date in the first place is to confirm compatibility, that's why I referenced and continue to reference compatibility.

On the meta it only really works to rule out incompatibility. In reality you could probably just skip the activity as soon as you both agree to do it. You'll find out the answers during the relationship, you don't need to speedrun it.

There's also an aspect of "is this real?" - if we want to just force a bond let's go to a theme park and dump adrenaline with each other for 6 hours. Way more fun.

It’ll only feel interrogation style if you make it that way. There are more casual ways of dealing with these things that are fun and not too serious!

That's the point, no? It filters out extremely early.

Did the questions as per the NYT article once on a first date. Been married two years to that woman. Was the first (and last) time I used those questions.

now the fun part - would you have married her anyway without those questions?

just like the hardest part of harvard is getting in - was your serious intent to go thru the NYT questions high enough signal that you didnt actually need to go thru the questions :)

And maybe her willingness to endure the questions for the sake of the date was a high enough signal from her :)

Bit even if that’s it - I can’t argue with the outcome.

No questions about children and their education? Shared family values, religion and life outlook? Seems like a good start but insufficient for complete marriages.

It's not a compatibility test. They're questions designed to foster feelings of "closeness".

I did this with a random stranger on Imgur a few years back. It was remarkably effective.

on Imgur? is there some sort of chat functionality or did you just go back and forth in comments?

Yeah, Imgur has a dm / chat function.

They are not "for complete marriages," they are questions that when asked and answered make the participation feel emotionally/romantically close to each other.

This is for romance, not marriages.

I ran OCR over the four picture with my phone, here is the text:

Ouestions/Tasks for Getting Close

(These were each printed on a separate 3x5 card)

Instructions: Read the first card out loud and do what it asks. Then read the second card, etc. Please don't skip any cards - do each in order. If it asks you a question, share your answer with your partner. Then let him or her share their answer to the same question with you. If it is a task, do it first, then let your partner do it. Alternate who goes first with the reading of each new card. You will probably not finish all the cards in each section with the time allotted.

1. Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.

2. Tell your partner something that you like about them already.

3. Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life.

4. 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?

5. If you were going to have a personal relationship with your knower, please share what would be important for him "or her to know

6. What would constitute a "perfect" evening for you?

REMINDER TO FOLLOW SPECIFIC INSTRUCTIONS: [Insert card for control group, yes only group, no only group, or yes and no group.

Control Group

At the beginning of today's experiment you and your partner were both given specific instructions. This is a brief reminder for you to keep sharing with your partner and to let them keep sharing with you.

Yes Only Group

At the beginning of today's experiment you and your partner were both given specific instructions.

This is a brief reminder that the best way to get very close to your partner is by saying yes to sharing yourself fully and letting them say yes to sharing with you.

No Only Group

At the beginning of today's experiment you and your partner were both given specific instructions. This is a brief reminder that the best way to not get too close to your partner is by saying no to the degree to which you share with each other.

Yes and No Group

At the beginning of today's experiment you and your partner were given specific instructions. This is a brief reminder that the best way for you to get close to your partner is for you to say yes to fully sharing and that the for the best way for you to not get too close is for you to say no to the degree of sharing that you do.

7. Alternate sharing something you find attractive in your partner; include the way he or she looks, dress and his or her personality.

Share a total of 10 items each.

8. For what in your life do you feel most grateful?

9. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one ability or quality, what would it be?

10. How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people's?

11. What is your most treasured memory?

12. What is your most terrible memory?

13. If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or the body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?

14. What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?

HALF-HOUR BREAK; CHANGE TO NEXT SET OF CARDS

15. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?

16. Is there something that you've dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven't you done it?

89 REMINDER TO FOLLOW SPECIFIC INSTRUCTIONS: At the beginning of today's experiment you and your partner were both given specific instructions to follow. This is just a brief reminder to keep following those instructions. Thank vou!

17. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future, or anything else, what would you want to know?

18. Share a personal problem and ask your partner's advice on how he or she might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen to share.

19. Name 3 things you and your partner appear to have in common.

20. Would you like to be famous? In what way?

21. If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?

22. Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why?

23. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?

24. Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire; after saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why?

25. Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as vour dinner guest?

HOUR BREAK; CHANGE TO NEXT SET OF CARDS

26. Make 3 true "we" statements each. For instance, "We are both in this room feeling

REMINDER TO FOLLOW SPECIFIC INSTRUCTIONS: At the beginning of today's experiment you and vour partner were both given specific instructions to follow. This is just a brief reminder to keep following those instructions. Thank you!

27. Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time saying things that you might not usually say to someone you've iust met.

28. What do you value most in a relationship?

29. If you wanted to look very sexy, how would you dress?

30. What roles do love and affection play in your life?

31. Role play with your partner how vou would ask them out for a date. Have your partner reflect back to vou how it makes them feel to be asked.

32. Complete the sentence: "I wish I had someone with whom I could share 19

33. Pretend you are in a play with your partner. In this particular scene the director has asked you to tell your partner that you are interested in having more than a casual relationship with them; that you are beginning to fall in love with them Your partner will also be pretending with you in this play and they are to tell you how it feels to be asked to move into a more meaningful relationship.

34. Spend three minutes in complete silence with your partner, making only eye contact.

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

36. If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?

37. How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?

38. Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?

39. What does love mean to you?

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

Question 37 as the branch point to Voight-Kampff.

Thank you. It might need a spell checker/proofreader. For example this one

32. Complete the sentence: "I wish I had someone with whom I could share ..."

Yes, i hope the OCR is good enough to get the idea and the original images are also available on twitter as a fallback.

I suspect there may be some selection bias in the original paper. I base this on the fact that, if I showed up to be a subject in a psychological experiment and saw this list of snoopy questions, I'd bail, and I doubt I'm the only one.

hey its me the OP just wondering - this title got changed from when i submitted it and i was wondering… what are the rules for titling tweets? was i breaking them?

my original title was like “The NYT’s 36 questions that lead to love was originally 40” so its not like this was thaaat different

There's some automated process that looks at canonical tags or some such. If you do a hn search for “dang title”, you'll probably find a complete explanation.

How many other people here wouldn't know how to answer most of these questions if asked?

I've thought about this on/off for an hour and I simply don't know how to answer most of these questions.

I've noticed this too. I used to do group therapy, and the therapist would say e.g. "Tell us about your most X memory". Everyone else knew immediately what they wanted to say. I'm still thinking about it months later.

I think, metaphorically speaking, my mind may not be indexed in the usual way.

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