36 Questions That Will Make You Fall in Love (With Your Family)

The Funeral and Memorial Council created Talk of a Lifetime to help families have better conversations.

In January of 2015, the New York Times article To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This went viral. Its premise was that by asking one another a series of 36 questions, couples could spark and accelerate romance. Psychologist Arthur Aron had pioneered the concept decades earlier, testing his theories in a laboratory, but writer Mandy Len Catron took things to a new level by trying the experiment in her own love life.

Catron and a date dove into the questions one warm night, sipping drinks in a bar. Within an hour, they’d learned more about each other than many couples do in years. They discussed their relationships with their mothers, shared their most treasured and terrible memories and spoke about what might constitute a perfect day. And afterwards, Catron wrote, they did indeed fall in love.

The article detailing their experience has been shared hundreds of thousands of times, inspiring countless people to try it themselves. But meanwhile, another set of 36 questions just as intriguing has been largely overlooked. The exercise I'm referring to is Talk of a Lifetime. Like Aron’s “fall-in-love” questions, it brings people closer together; the difference is that it’s designed to strengthen familial bonds rather than igniting romance.

FAMIC (The Funeral and Memorial Council) created Talk of a Lifetime to help families have better conversations. The group agreed, based on decades and decades of collective experience, that deep, honest conversation is often therapeutic when a family member is dying. By offering families a framework for opening up and sharing memories, Talk of a Lifetime enables them to honor loved ones’ lives more completely.

Reply to explore more about this unique interaction method.