We can read Christian Rudder's Dataclysm, about the way the Internet is affecting how people meet and date, or Eric Klinenberg’s Going Solo, or Michael Rosenfeld’s “ How Couples Meet and Stay Together” what those projects can gloss over, though, are the small joys and also the crushing existential anxieties that the new romantic order can provoke in its participants. Too often, the data experts have gathered about the nebulous thing that is “modern romance” is presented precisely as that: data. They operate at the scale of everyday life and everyday experience and everyday emotion. (Telling the story of Tim, an older gentleman who asked his future wife on a date in person, right after meeting her, Ansari points out: “That sounds infinitely cooler than texting back and forth with a girl for two weeks only to have her flake on a Sugar Ray concert.”) The commonly accepted rules that used to direct coupling- wait three days to call, etc.-have largely been rendered obsolete.Īnd while Modern Romance’s revelations aren’t terribly revelatory, their telling is refreshing in an important way: They’re humanized. He sums it all up charmingly and winkily and am I rightily, with the same light snark he deploys in his standup. He cites exactly the research you’d expect to be cited. Ansari quotes all the experts ( Michael Rosenfeld, Sherry Turkle, Natasha Sch ü ll, Helen Fisher, Barry Schwartz) you’d expect to be quoted in a book like this.

The stuff explored in the book-the gender differences in approaches to online dating, the social effects of friends-with-benefits-ing, the psychological impact of a swipe-right economy-will feel familiar to anyone who reads magazines and/or is currently single. None of which, as Modern Romance presents it, is a revelation. “Younger generations face immense pressure to find the ‘perfect person,’” Ansari notes-a pressure that “simply didn't exist in the past when ‘good enough’ was good enough.” In a similar study conducted in the early 1990s, 91 percent of women and 87 percent of men said they wouldn't marry someone unless they were in love with them. In the 1960s, 76 percent of college-aged women and 35 percent of college-aged men said they'd be willing to marry someone they didn't love. “Younger generations face immense pressure to find the ‘perfect person,’” Ansari notes-a pressure that “simply didn't exist in the past when ‘good enough’ was good enough.” Emerging adulthood, the phase of life between adolescence and marriage (and a phase that didn’t exist for most previous generations of Americans), now doubles as a time when many young people embark not just on a professional career, but on a romantic one. We live, in other words, in a world that is shaped, in ways big and small, by the search for a soul mate.

Modern love aziz ansari