Love after the 36-question experiment: 'It was a date we'll never forget

In January, a survey that claimed to make people fall in love swept the internet. Did they live happily after?

About six weeks after I took part in the 36 Questions That Make You Fall In Love experiment, a woman approached me as I browsed magazines in a book shop in Lagos, Nigeria. :Excuse me," she asked. "Are you Bim Adewunmi from the paper?" I confirmed fer suspicion. Encouraged, she put her hand on my arm in a classic "auntie" move and, without preamble, blurted out: "So, is Archie your boyfriend now?" As narratives of experiment is fairytale-adjacent - real people in an unreal situation - which is the sweet spot for many people's romantic side. Archie and I were characters, and readers love a perfect narrative, wrapped up in a bow.

In the direct aftermath of writing that Archie had "very kind eyes" and revealing that I was the kind of person to say "lean in to the awkwardness", only half in jest, I received a whole bunch of messages : tweets, texts and emails from friends and colleagues. Here's all anyone wanted to know: did it work? Was I in love? Had something so ridiculously extreme been effective? "So... are you guys going out now?" read one text. "Wait, what?! Are you an item?" came a tweet. Via email, a friend joked about how dire London's dating situation must be if I was forced to resort to such drastic measures("for 'work', sure").

It turns out that, no matter what cynical face we present to the world, people really love love. And they want to believe they have been witness to the magic, that they saw, or read, something unfold in front of their eyes. It was a date I'll never forget, and one of the most bracingly intimate nights of my life, but the truth is so much more prosaic. The church hats will have to be returned: we did not fall in love. I have literally not seen Archie since that January evening, except once in a mutual friend's Instagram photo. And if you think you're disappointed, you haven't looked in to the eyes of a stranger in a Lagos bookshop, crestfallen at the state of my love life. 

Really, it was a ruthless ambush. Go on a date with another journalist and ask loads of incredibly personal questions and stare in to each other's eyes for four minutes, my editor said. It has to be this evening, she said. No, you don't have time to go home and get rid of your terrible neckbeard, she said.

Uneasy as I was with the whole humiliating concept, I didn't expect to enjoy myself. Three hours later, I sat face to face with Bim in a deserted square, trying not to giggle, feeling as though I had known her for a million years. To my complete surprise, it was brilliant. Since then, I've been on several dates, and I've kept my facial hair more or less in check for all of them. The key takeaway: don't write about your romantic life for a newspaper and imagine that anyone you go for a drink with won't have already Googled it. The 36 questions have an afterlife: once people know you've asked them, you won't be able to escape them.

This will create complications. Sometimes, you will want to stare into your date's eyes for four minutes; your date will gently intimate that this is probably not a great idea. Sometimes, it will be the other way around. On the rare occasions when you both think it's worth a go, you may, for example, have a complete stranger interrupt you as they take the bins out.

Happily, it's not all rubbish and rejection. The questions gave me a lovely, hilarious, strangely intimate evening with Bim. Even if the experiment hustled us straight past love and in to affectionate old flames, it gave us a night that I don't suppose either of us will forget.

That evening has stuck with me in other ways, too. I don't exactly go around forcing potential squeezes to tell me their life story in four minutes (question 11) or ask which family member's death they would find most disturbing (question 35), but I feel freshly aware that these are not, in the end, stupid or embarrassing questions. It turns out that knowing real things about a person, discovering the idiosyncrasies of their weirdness, will probably only make you like them more. In turn, they may be liberatingly OK with your oddities, too. That was the unexpected consequence of going on the most awkward date of my life: it made me reluctant to go on any other kind.