The Love Experiment review: RTÉ's new show brings science to the dating game
Shannel Lynch on The Love Experiment, the new dating show on RTÉ2.
First dates are intense. But not 36-questions intense – and not four-minutes-staring-wordlessly-at-each-other intense.
Yet this is what you get with The Love Experiment, a new dating show that began on Thursday on RTÉ2. It involves two strangers paired together, asking each other a series of questions that scientific studies suggest can lead to love.
The social experiment was designed by psychologist Dr Arthur Aron in the 1990s and is built around 36 questions to fall in love. The idea is that a set of questions, which gradually promote intimacy, can create the conditions for love. In the series, this set of questions is followed by a four-minute stare.
The four-part series will introduce us to eight couples, and tonight we met two of them. Shannel Lynch, 30, a mum-of-two from Dublin who grew up in foster care, is paired with Jason Garvey, 33, a father-of-two from Clondalkin, whose kids are his life.
And Dubliner Mairead McDevitt, a community and youth worker with a passion for human rights, meets Jonathan Kaufmann, an American living in Dublin and working for a large corporate company.
We get to know each of them as they get to know each other. And with the questions designed to test compatibility, cutting out the small talk to go a bit deeper, it’s not surprising, as Jonathan puts it, that “things got very intimate very quickly”.
True, we hear how Mairead likes 1990s rave music and does the best poached eggs, that Jonathan once went blank doing stand-up, that Shannel hates when a date takes a forkful of food from her plate and that Jason admires Steve Jobs.
But questions like what would you change about how you were reared, and what’s your worst memory, elicit much bigger stuff than first dates typically do. So we see Jason shed tears, recalling his grandfather’s sudden death. We see Mairead painfully recount a memory of a very personal attack.
Behind the scenes, psychologist Dr Malie Coyne gives input on the experiment, and shares intriguing observations on how we might interpret the couples’ compatibility. When each member of the couple is asked to tell the other what they like about them, Coyne explains if they select physical characteristics, it’s more likely they fancy the other person. And mixing the physical with deeper things is a really good sign.
Almost on cue, Mairead tells Jonathan he has really nice eyes and then…. a great smile. The signs are definitely good.
The Love Experiment isn’t your usual dating show. And it’s all the better for that. Because it’s honest, without any game-playing, it’s clear and meaningful – two people sitting in chairs across from each other, just talking.
