I’ve thought before that if I were single today I’d probably forgo dating sites and the swiping Tinder malarkey and just concentrate on finding myself a nice strong noose. Obviously I’m joking, but comedian and Parks and Recreation actor Aziz Ansari’s Modern Romance serves both to reinforce and undermine this notion. On the cover, Ansari has hearts for eyes and a mobile phone in his hand, encapsulating the aim of the book – to decipher how love, sex and romance have become thrillingly liberated, yet also complicated and distorted by modern times and changing technology.
Ansari writes: “A century ago people would find a decent person who lived in their neighbourhood. Their families would meet and, after they decided neither party was a murderer, the couple would get married and have a kid, all by the time they were 22. Today, people spend years of their lives on a quest to find the perfect person, a soul mate.”
To facilitate their unprecedented romantic options, people have dating apps, mobile phones and social media, Yet, points out Ansari, they also have dilemmas du jour, such as what to think when someone is too busy to reply to a text but posts photos of their breakfast on Instagram (as happened to him). Then there’s the wider, more toxic issue of whether this smorgasbord of options is genuinely making people happier.
Along with Eric Klinenberg, professor of sociology at New York University, Ansari embarks on an extensive search for answers, making trips to different cultures (Tokyo, Paris, Buenos Aires) for comparison, and also utilising focus groups, a Reddit research forum, a Match.com study and interviews with sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists and ordinary people all over the world (some of whom agreed to be tracked via text, email, dating sites and apps).
Modern Romance doesn’t pretend to be about everyone – it focuses on heterosexual relationships, specifically those of middle-class, university-educated people who delay having children until their late 20s or 30s. This is basically people like thirtysomething Ansari (now in a relationship) who have a period of “emerging adulthood”, unlike previous generations, for whom proximity was key, marital age was earlier, and for women at least, escaping from the parental home was a significant incentive and divorce was another escape. Back then, “companionate” marriages were the norm, as opposed to the relatively new fashion for finding your soulmate and demanding that they tick every box, or as psychotherapist Esther Perel says: “Basically asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide.”
While the idea of the soulmate may be unrealistic, it looks nigh-on heroic considering the technologically enabled pitfalls facing the romantically inclined today. This is an era when texting to ask for dates is the norm, phoning is deemed an astonishing romantic commitment and vague droning on about “hanging out” is fast replacing being asked out at all. It’s a time when human beings can be judged with a casual swipe of a finger and social media allows loser-manipulators to nurture delusions of stud-dom.
On the plus side, there’s more choice than ever before, though Ansari ponders whether even this is double edged, trapping people into the mindset that they’re “missing out” by “settling” too early. Poignantly, it becomes clear that shyness, lack of confidence and paranoia haven’t gone out of fashion. But then, nor have game playing, manipulation and shocking bad manners from both sexes. As Ansari says, most people stink at online dating, which he likens to “a second job that requires knowledge and skills that very few of us have”.
Ansari is particularly funny on such matters as sexting, the self-defeating ubiquity of dating site male openers (“Hey”, “Whassup?”) and the perfect online dating photo (cleavage for females, and scuba diving for males, apparently). What emerges is a book that is somewhat inconclusive (how could it not be on such a vast subject?), but is nonetheless entertaining and illuminating.
Quite apart from anything else, and perhaps this is a sign of the times, it’s refreshing to hear a modern male voice on the subject of love and sex, without the now predictable Pick Up Artist-style guff about “negging”, and basically browbeating and conning women (bitches that they are!) into bed. Kidding themselves that they’re so cutting edge, these bozos are really just old-style misogynists and it is high time they bored off.
In stark contrast to these depressing excuses for masculinity, in Modern Romance, Ansari comes across as a decent, thoughtful, amusing guy, with a genuine interest in the modern dating whirl, on behalf of males and females alike. Despite the combined human-cum-technological effort to screw everything up, it seems that love can still conquer all.
Modern Romance is published by Allen Lane (£16.99). Click here to order a copy for £12.99
