Reframing Love: Beyond Traditional Narratives

Mandy Len Catron is known for her wildly popular Modern Love essay in the New York Times, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This." She popularized the 36 questions that are said to make people fall in love. Mandy’s essay inspired her book of the same name.

In the book, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This," Mandy deconstructs her own personal canon of love stories through a series of candid and vulnerable essays. She dives all the way back to 1944, when her grandparents first met in a coal mining town in Appalachia, to her own dating life as a professor in Vancouver, drawing insights from her research into the universal psychology, biology, history, and literature of love. And she tells the story of how she decided to test a psychology experiment that she’d read about — where the goal was to create intimacy between strangers using a list of thirty-six questions — and ended up in the surreal situation of having millions of people following her brand-new relationship.

Originally published in July 2017. Watch this episode at youtube.com/TalksAtGoogle.