Love In the Age of Big Data

The Huffington Post:

Once upon a time, in the Pony Expresso cafe in Seattle, a man and a woman began to experience the long-mysterious but increasingly scientifically investigated thing we call love. The first stage is called “limerence.” This is the spine-tingling, heart-twisting, can’t-stop-staring feeling, when it seems as though the world stops whirling and time itself bows down and pauses before the force of your longing. The man, a then-44-year-old University of Washington research psychologist named John Gottman, was drawn to the woman’s wild mane of black curly hair and her creativity: She was an amateur musician and painter as well as a psychologist like himself. The woman, a then-35-year-old named Julie Schwartz, who’d placed a personal ad in the Seattle Weekly that John had answered, was turned on by John’s humble little car—voted the ugliest vehicle in the University of Washington faculty parking lot—and his expansive curiosity. He read physics and math and history and kept a little spiral-bound notebook in his pocket that he used to jot down things his companions said that captivated him.

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His career took off when he met a psychologist named Robert Levenson. Each man turned out to be exactly what the other had needed. Levenson was investigating the remarkable variance in how different people react to stress by testing their heart rates and sweat-gland activity after receiving a jolt. By teaming up with John, he says he finally felt as if he was working on something more “personally relevant and emotionally rich” than administering electric shocks. Meanwhile, by joining with Levenson, John thought he might uncover a way to measure marital happiness that was more “real” than people’s self-reporting on surveys.

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Based on work by Arthur Aron, a psychologist at Stony Brook University, the article proposed that love could be established if a pair of random people asked each other a specific set of 36 increasingly intimate questions (“Would you like to be famous? In what way?”) and then silently stared into each other’s eyes for four minutes. Two strangers paired for Aron’s study actually ended up married six months later. It seemed to prove that love is a masterable technique rather than an uncontrollable force that often gives us pain. And people went wild for it. The article was viewed by more than 8 million people. Within weeks, Apple’s App Store unveiled eight different apps based on it, one titled simply, “Fall in Love.”

Read the whole story: The Huffington Post