another city, your spouse (or lover) meets and spends a night w/ an exciting stranger. Given they will never meet again, and you will not otherwise learn of the incident, would you want your partner to tell you about it? In the original experiment, researchers created a control group where questions were based around small-talk -- far less emotionally probing questions such as: - What gifts did you receive last Christmas/Hanukkah? - What foreign country would you most like to visit? What attracts you to this place? In the original 1997 "fast friends" experiment, even before the hour was up, participants in the main group typically identified strong feelings of closeness with their partner, often exchanging contact details and indicating a wish to meet up again. This was far pronounced than members of the control group that paired up to engage in small-talk. Lo and behold, most participants in my Stream study reported experiencing an intense feeling of having bonded with their experiment partner within 45 minutes. "We certainly became very close in an extremely short period of time," one participant said; another said with surprise that she had revealed things that not even her boyfriend knew. Some pairs of new friends were still taking two hours later. "I'm glad it worked so well, and I was happy to hear the procedure has been applied in such a real world setting," Arthur Aron said when I shared the results with him. "The effect is based not just on reciprocal self-disclosure,