Ask the 36 Questions That Bring People Closer A source-backed three-stage closeness exercise based on Arthur Aron’s 36 progressively personal questions, presented through UC Berkeley Greater Good in Action.
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Sign in 1. Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?
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Opens Set I with an imaginative preference question that gets both people disclosing something real before anything harder is asked.
2. Would you like to be famous? In what way?
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Second in Set I, its follow-up clause turns a yes-or-no into a statement of ambition, the kind of disclosure the small-talk control never produced.
3. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?
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Third in Set I and the first to turn inward, surfacing a minor, near-universal self-consciousness that costs little to admit but is genuinely revealing.
4. What would constitute a "perfect" day for you?
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Fourth in Set I, it asks for an imagined day in concrete detail, which reveals priorities far more sharply than any direct question about values.
5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?
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The first prompt to require an actual memory rather than a hypothetical, escalating within itself from a private habit to a named audience.
6. If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?
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Set I's only forced choice, it makes each person rank mind against body and so state plainly what they most fear losing.
7. Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?
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Set I's midpoint and its sharpest turn, asking for a private belief about mortality that almost nobody has a rehearsed answer to.
8. Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common.
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The first prompt whose subject is the pair rather than the individual, asking each person to name overlaps and produce a shared answer.
9. For what in your life do you feel most grateful?
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The first unambiguously warm prompt, reaching personal history through affection rather than interrogation just before the sequence asks for full autobiography.
10. If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?
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The first prompt to name family directly, framed as an edit rather than a description so each speaker sets the depth themselves.
11. Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.
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The first prompt in the sequence to request a sustained monologue, giving each speaker four uninterrupted minutes of autobiography under a fixed clock.
12. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?
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Closes Set I with a light hypothetical that reads as self-diagnosis, since it lands immediately after each person has narrated their life story.
13. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future, or anything else, what would you want to know?
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Opens Set II by imposing no subject at all, so the territory each person chooses to ask about is itself the disclosure.
14. Is there something that you've dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven't you done it?
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A pleasant question about ambition that its follow-up clause turns into an account of the speaker's own obstacles, nerve and self-doubt.
15. What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?
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The sequence's one invitation to boast, exposing not only what a person did but how much they privately think it was worth.
16. What do you value most in a friendship?
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Asks for a stated standard rather than a fact, exposing the criteria a person applies to the people they choose to keep.
17. What is your most treasured memory?
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Opens the sequence's only matched pair of inverses, establishing a format on comfortable material one prompt before the same format is reused for painful material.
18. What is your most terrible memory?
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The heaviest request in the middle block, arriving immediately after its inverse so that the format for answering it is already established.
19. If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?
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The middle rung of the sequence's mortality thread, adding a year's notice and demanding an account of what would actually change.
20. What does friendship mean to you?
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The second of two friendship prompts four items apart, pulling a definition where the earlier one pulled a criterion.
21. What roles do love and affection play in your life?
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One of the few items to name love at all, and it asks what role love plays across a whole life rather than anything about the present exchange.
22. Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner. Share a total of five items.
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Turns the sequence outward for the first time, asking each person to name five specific positive traits in the other rather than in themselves.
23. How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people's?
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Moves Set II from abstract values to family of origin, and asks for a comparative judgement about whether one's childhood was happier than most.
24. How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?
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Closes Set II with its bluntest prompt, narrowing the family thread to a single relationship just before the sequence's hardest block begins.
25. Make three true "we" statements each. For instance, "We are both in this room feeling…"
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Opens Set III by requiring first-person-plural statements, the procedure's most direct push toward a shared sense of identity between two people.
26. Complete this sentence: "I wish I had someone with whom I could share…"
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A sentence stem that forces a first-person admission of something missing, placed immediately after the pair has been asked to describe itself as a unit.
27. If you were going to become a close friend with your partner, please share what would be important for them to know.
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Asks for a deliberately curated self-introduction framed around friendship, the outcome the closeness procedure was actually designed to generate.
28. Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things that you might not say to someone you've just met.
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Repeats the earlier appreciation exchange at a higher stake, explicitly asking for honesty that would be withheld from a new acquaintance.
29. Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life.
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Trades tragedy for exposure, asking for a moment of social humiliation that is risky to admit but light enough to be spoken aloud early in Set III.
30. When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?
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Asks for a recent, concrete episode rather than a hypothetical, and splits it in two so private crying is disclosed alongside public.
31. Tell your partner something that you like about them.
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The third and lightest of the appreciation prompts, arriving after roughly forty-five minutes in which the two people have stopped being strangers.
32. What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?
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The one Set III prompt phrased as an opinion, revealing a person's protected subject without requiring them to narrate the wound behind it.
33. 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?
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Sits deep in the final block, asking for something withheld from someone else entirely, so the disclosure doubles as a rehearsal of the conversation being avoided.
34. 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?
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Uses a Set I-style hypothetical to reach Set III depth, since the object chosen matters far less than the reason given for saving it.
35. Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why?
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The sequence's steepest ask, putting mortality and family together one step before the closing prompt turns the exchange toward mutual helping.
36. Share a personal problem and ask your partner's advice on how they might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.
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Closes the sequence by scripting responsiveness itself, asking the listener to reflect back the speaker's feeling rather than simply reciprocate.
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