Entrepreneur, Senior Leader & Ecosystem Builder with a degrees in Music, Psychology, Digital Mgmt & Transformation. Co-founder of the Music Factory and Earkick. Life-long learner with a deep passion for people, mental health and outdoor sports.
I bet we’ve all read a hundred “how to fall in love” tips and still end the night staring at our ceiling like it owes us answers. Answers that fit the 36 questions to make you fall in love. Or answers that help navigate today’s complexity of dating, the confusion of a hyperconnected world, and a maze of unmet needs.
Sure, dates happen. Endless messages flow, and chemistry may even show up right on schedule. But then it ghosts you like it had an urgent meeting. One person makes your pulse race and your judgment disappear. Another one is kind, steady, emotionally available, and your brain goes oddly quiet, like it forgot what it came here to do.
An Ocean of Unsolicited Advice
And literally everyone has advice. Friends hand you slogans, family makes introductions, and apps hand you a million options. You catch yourself doubting whether you really want to know how to fall in love. Is it even worth trying this hard?
Polite small talk starts to feel like a job interview for a role you never wanted. You keep presenting the best version of yourself, then wonder why you feel unseen. At some point, it gets personal. Things others have said or insinuated creep into your mind and start dialing up the volume. Maybe you are too picky, too guarded, too late, or too something.
What Hurts Most
Deep down, you know you want the real thing. The part where your nervous system unclenches, where you can exhale around someone. Yet the world keeps pushing a story where
Love is either instant fireworks or a dead battery
This Earkick article is for the moment you feel like you’re not good enough to learn how to fall in love. If you want to know why and how you were taught the wrong map, read on.
The “How to Fall in Love” Trap
Most reasonable people try harder or optimize when they feel like falling in love doesn’t work. Maybe you also start overthinking. Or you treat love like a goal you can force into existence with the right strategy and enough emotional cardio.
Which is exactly how people try to fall asleep.
Falling asleep has a cruel rule. The moment you decide, “Now. Sleep. Do it,” your brain starts performing. It checks your heartbeat, audits the day, and negotiates tomorrow. Pressure turns into an immediate alertness you did not invite to your bedtime routine.
Love has a similar trap. Grip the outcome too hard, and your body goes into evaluation mode. The scanning, comparing, testing, and protecting begin. Suddenly, your date turns into an exam called
“Will this become something?”
Confidence can be the costume, while underneath, it often feels like a silent emergency. You want the feeling, so you chase the feeling. Soon, the chase becomes the whole relationship.
What “How to Fall in Love” Means Scientifically
Picture a tiny security guard living in your chest. Every time you meet someone new, that guard runs the same three checks on repeat:
- Is it safe?
- Worth coming closer?
- Do they come closer too?
“Falling in love” is the moment that guard unclenches and says, “Okay. Let them in.”
Attention locks in, and this person starts showing up in your mind without an invitation. Your body joins the conversation, too, with its whole mix of signals: warmth, jitters, calm, craving, and excitement. Then attachment flickers on. Being around them starts to matter in a real way, sometimes steadying you, sometimes throwing you off. At the same time, your sense of “me” stretches. What matters to them starts to matter to you, and plans begin forming without you pushing them into place.
Love is rarely one clean emotion. It’s a bundle of bonding, desire, trust, and meaning, mixed in different ratios for different people.
That’s why the same date can feel “boring” to one person and “peaceful” to another. Your brain reads the same moment through your own history. Think past love, past stress, people who hurt you before. The patterns your body learned to expect, long before you had words for them.
If love feels random, it’s tempting to grab something that looks structured. The internet is full of scripts, sequences, and shortcuts on how to fall in love. They carry the promise that you can do the right steps and finally get the feeling you want.
That’s exactly why the “36 questions” keep coming back. They offer a clean story in a messy dating world.
How to Fall in Love with 36 Questions
The famous “36 questions to make you fall in love” stem from a 1997 psychology study. Researchers successfully tested whether two people could fast-forward closeness through a specific kind of conversation. One detail lit the internet on fire:
Months later, two participants ended up married.
The Myths Around How to Fall in Love
The biggest myth is that the 36 questions are a love potion. Ask them, stare into each other’s eyes, and romance is supposed to appear like a receipt at the end of a transaction.
Another myth is that the questions work because they are uniquely brilliant or perfectly phrased, as if the magic lives inside sentence number 17.
A third myth is that the exercise proves you can manufacture love on demand, even if values clash, attraction is missing, or one person is not emotionally available.
People also treat the eye-contact part like the main event, when it’s really just an intensity amplifier. And finally, the internet version often forgets consent. It frames the questions as a hack you spring on someone, rather than a mutual agreement to go deeper.
The Facts Around How to Fall in Love
The real science story is more grounded and more useful. All questions were designed as a procedure to generate interpersonal closeness between two people, often strangers, by creating sustained, escalating, reciprocal self-disclosure. In plain terms, this means that both people answer and take turns. Then the prompts gradually move from light to personal, so vulnerability builds step by step instead of all at once.
That structure matters more than the exact wording. It reduces the usual dating friction where one person overshares, the other stays vague, and both leave confused. The structure also creates a rare block of uninterrupted attention, which is basically an endangered resource in modern dating.
The result is often a real spike in felt closeness, warmth, and “I know you” energy.
That can feel like falling in love because closeness and love share a lot of emotional oxygen. Yet the exercise doesn’t guarantee romance, compatibility, or long-term bonding. Love is what may grow after the closeness moment, when attraction, timing, shared values, and mutual choice keep reinforcing the bond in real life.
The 36 questions are best understood as a fast track to intimacy, rather than a guarantee of a relationship.
The Big Lies Around How to Fall in Love
Here are the most common stories that start messing with your head if you let them. Let’s shine a light on them, so you spot them before they fool you.
Lie 1: Love is Effortless
Early love can feel smooth because novelty is doing free labor. Depth asks for patience later. So if effort shows up, it can be a sign of reality, rather than failure.
Lie 2: Fireworks are Required
Fireworks can mean attraction. But it can also mean your anxiety is wearing a cute outfit. Plenty of people confuse intensity with compatibility.
Lie 3: Calm Equals Settling
Calm can be your nervous system relaxing for the first time in a long time. And it can also be a lack of attraction. Confusing the two is how people walk away from their healthiest option.
Lie 4: Some People Just Fall in Love Easily
Falling fast can mean open-hearted. Yet it can also mean skipping information your future self will need. So, slow can be prudent, a sign of standards, and your nervous system doing its job.
Lie 5: If it Hasn’t Happened By a Certain Age, You’re Doomed
Humans are not yogurt! Life can make you careful, busy, grief-stricken, guarded, and also wiser. Any of those can delay the fall without saying anything bad about your capacity to love.
How Modern Dating Kills The Spark
Modern dating loves convenience, but love loves contact. Those two don’t always get along and can mess with learning how to fall in love. Let’s explore why and how that happens.
The Endless Menu Effect
When options feel infinite, your brain treats people like tabs. One awkward moment and the mind goes: “Next.” One flaw, and it starts shopping for an upgrade.
That mindset changes your behavior without asking permission. You stop tolerating the normal early-stage clunkiness that every real connection comes with. You also stop investing long enough for familiarity to turn into warmth.
The Performance Trap
First dates turn into auditions. You try to be interesting, chill, witty, mysterious, emotionally intelligent, flirtatious but safe, confident but not arrogant, open but not intense. That is a lot of jobs for one human nervous system.
While you perform, you can’t fully connect. As a consequence, your attention is part on them, and part on how you are coming across. Even if the date goes well, you leave with a strange emptiness. Yes, you were present, yet you were also managing yourself the entire time.
The “Texting is Intimacy” Illusion
A great chat can feel like chemistry. Fast replies feel like care, and long messages feel like depth.
Then you meet, and the spell breaks. Or you never meet, and the bond still grows in your head because your brain fills in the blanks. That means you fall in love with a version of someone (or something!) built from imagination and dopamine.
Love can start online, sure. Yet love usually needs real-world data. You need to experience tone, timing, repair after awkwardness, micro-kindness, how someone handles small stress, and whether their presence settles you. Texting often skips the data and feeds the fantasy.
The Intimacy Whiplash Cycle
Many people bounce between two extremes:
- endless small talk that never gets real
- sudden deep disclosure that feels intense and “fated”
While small talk creates boredom, oversharing generates false closeness. The result is whiplash: intense nights followed by vague mornings. Emotional hangovers and feeling exposed, or foolish and hooked.
The Safety Problem Nobody Names
Your body decides love before your logic does. If you have a history of inconsistency, abandonment, criticism, or chaos, your system can mistake intensity for connection. It can also mistake steadiness for danger because steadiness feels unfamiliar.
Modern dating forces your brain to make snap decisions with very little real information. Add endless comparison and confusing signals that get treated like a game, and your nervous system stays on edge instead of opening up.
You might call it “having a type,” while your body calls it “trying to solve an old problem with a new person.”
The Attention Famine
Love is built out of attention. Human attention, not screen attention. Unfortunately, undivided attention is rare now. Dates happen while phones buzz, and conversations get interrupted. People half-listen while planning their next line. Even couples who like each other can feel oddly disconnected because neither one is fully there.
A relationship cannot deepen on leftovers.
The Conflict Allergy
Modern dating pushes the clean narrative of good vibes only, easy flow, and no friction. The first misunderstanding becomes a red flag, and the first awkward moment is labeled “lack of chemistry.” Have your first disappointment, and you’ll hear “we’re not aligned.”
Test the waters with this list of uncomfortable questions to ask your partner!
The Myth That Love is a Lightning Strike
A lot of people are waiting for a cinematic moment because it feels safer than trying. Lightning removes responsibility because it makes the choice for you. It also keeps you stuck, because most real love grows more like a campfire than an explosion.
How To Fall In Love In Real Life
Falling in love often grows from what happens again and again. When someone shows up, listens, and meets you with warmth, your body starts to relax around them. Give those moments time to stack, and feelings can build on their own.
Pick Someone You Can Gather Real Data With
Choose dates that give you evidence: do they show up, stay present, follow through, and handle small friction with respect. Love grows from lived experience, not potential.
Create One Weekly “Depth Container”
Once a week, set aside 30 to 60 minutes for deliberate closeness. Take turns and keep it simple.
Use this four-step loop.
- Has something been taking up space in your head lately?
- What do you wish someone understood about you right now?
- Has anything felt genuinely good this week?
- What would you love to do together next?
→ Mutual effort, repeated, turns a good date into a real connection.
Add One Tiny Repair Move
Early closeness needs safety. Use a clean reset when something lands awkwardly. It can even be funny and entertaining:
“Let me say that again more clearly.”
→ Fix small awkward moments with care as they happen, and you will see trust build quickly.
Let Your Body Vote With Evidence
After each date, ask:
- Do I feel more regulated around them over time?
- Do I feel clearer after we talk?
→ Feeling calm and clear around someone is a strong sign that love can grow.
Turn Closeness Into A Choice
When it feels real, make it real with one direct line:
“I like what’s growing here. I want to explore it with intention. Are you in?”
→ Mutual choice gives love oxygen.
Try This Tonight
Pick one person who feels worth another round. Invite them into something ordinary this week. It can be a walk after work, groceries, cooking something simple, or a low-key coffee where your phones stay in your pocket. Ordinary settings are powerful because they shrink the fantasy and increase the data. Your nervous system learns fastest when the moment feels real.
Halfway in, bring in one deliberate “closeness move” that research keeps circling back to: take turns and go one step deeper than usual. Use one question that invites a real answer and makes reciprocity easy:
“What do you want this year, and what usually gets in the way?”
Answer first if you want to make it safer. Then listen like you mean it, and let them ask you back.
Here’s what you’re watching for, in simple terms. Does the conversation create warmth without performance? Is there vulnerability, and does it stay balanced? Do small awkward moments get handled with care? Observe if your body relaxes and attention locks in. If the urge to keep talking appears.
Then, if you walk home feeling a little clearer and a little calmer, you just found the kind of signal most people skip while chasing sparks. That’s how to fall in love naturally, how love starts growing: as repeated evidence that it’s safe to come closer.
Now stop scrolling and set a real date!
