Aziz Ansari just explained to me why that girl from the Northwestern movie premiere didn’t text me back, and this alone might make his print debut Modern Romance worth a read—besides that it’s funny, thoughtful, and genuinely valuable, a scientific journal disguised as a book of laughs.
Modern Romance urges you to think about how you date, and, as a result, the reading experience comes with a lot of self-reflection. It might even prompt some changes in your approach. (I’m now considering a personal call-only rule for my initial asks: though Ansari’s focus groups labeled it a high-risk MO, it’s also high-reward.) I don’t have a Tinder profile or any sort of online dating presence, but it’s easy to see how someone more deeply immersed in the cyber-dating world could glean even further material for application. Modern Romance does a good job of putting everything in the wider context of romance, continually contrasting old dating habits with new ones. My parents could read this book and find the statistics interesting (or appalling: one in three couples that married between 2005 and 2012 met via an online dating site—my dad would have thrown the book right there).
