Classic love stories have limited our idea of what is possible when it comes to intimacy, according to the woman who wrote a viral essay on 36 questions that accelerate closeness between any two given people.

Mandy Len Catron’s piece To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This was shared thousands of times after appearing on the New York Times in 2015, and remains one of the paper’s most-read pieces.

Now Catron has a new book out, How to Fall in Love with Anyone, which expands on the premise that we have control over creating a lasting relationship.

In her original essay, Catron re-created an experiment by psychologist Arthur Aron, whereby two strangers ask each other a set of increasingly personal questions – such as “how do you feel about your relationship with your mother” – before staring into each others’ eyes for four minutes.

It sounds awkward, but the process is designed to accelerate intimacy normally forged over a period of weeks or months, into a period of a couple of hours. And amazingly, Catron and her partner Mark are still together after trying the experiment on their first date more than two years ago:

The fallacy of film love: viral author unpicks the science of intimacy