For Aziz Ansari, the worst romantic dates are not the disastrous ones, the evenings that end in awkward silence or acute embarrassment or childhood anecdotes so boring you decide to make a break for it from the bathroom window. No, the worst encounters are those that seem initially promising and then fizzle out – the contacts who “die inside your phone” or never respond to your text messages. The ones about which you will always wonder if you let something special slip through your grasp.

One such situation prompted the 31-year-old comedian, who is best known for his role in NBC’s sitcom Parks and Recreation, to write a book on the perils of the modern dating scene. In the introduction, he recounts the story of a woman called Tanya who inexplicably never replied to his texts after they spent an enjoyable night snogging in a Hollywood house he had rented from James Earl Jones. (Ansari does not believe in self-deprecation. The book begins: “Oh shit! Thanks for buying my book. That money is MINE.” Its final section ends: “Okay, well. I’m fucking done with my book!!! YEAH!!!”)

Depressed by Tanya’s failure to reply, Ansari told his tale of woe on stage and had an epiphany: “I could tell that every guy and girl in the audience had had their own Tanya in their phone at one point or another.” So, as you do, he scored a $3.5m (£2.28m) advance from Penguin and hooked up with the sociology professor Eric Klinenberg to research the subject through focus groups and a special internet forum. The book is therefore grandly billed as an “investigation” into modern romance.

Before we go on, a brief aside. The first news of Ansari’s project was announced in late 2013, just after Lena Dunham, the 29-year-old writer and star of HBO’s Girls, collected a reported $3.7m advance for her non-fiction debut, Not That Kind of Girl. Her book covers roughly the same ground as Modern Romance – life advice for twentysomething Americans suffering from ennui in the absence of anything else wrong in their lives – but its initial reception was very different. As Dunham put it to the Hollywood Reporter last month: “When it was leaked how much I was getting for my book, there were 39,000 articles asking, ‘Is she worth it?’ Then it came out what Aziz Ansari was making on his book. No one says a goddamn word.” Dunham’s book was also framed as a personal memoir, while Ansari’s effort was inspired, we were told, by reading the non-fiction heavyweight Malcolm Gladwell.

Now, as it happens, Dunham’s book did turn out to be navel-gazing and relentlessly personal (the 10-page food diary from 2009 was a low point), while Ansari has successfully bestowed an aura of objectivity on his project with the inclusion of focus group data and the odd pie chart. But there’s definitely something bigger going on here, particularly since the gender divide – men have facts, women have feelings – is repeated so often across the publishing industry. From the start, a million tiny shoves sent Dunham in one direction, and Ansari in the other. And somehow yet again, without anyone being able to pinpoint exactly how it happened, a woman ended up writing a personal story – lauded for its revelatory frankness, but castigated for being unrepresentative of the whole of her sex – while a man has merely “drawn on his own experiences” to produce an “in-depth exploration” of a supposedly universal phenomenon. Nowhere in the book does Ansari acknowledge that being a rich, famous, attractive comedian means his approach to dating isn’t that relatable. (Oh man, if only I had thought before about inviting people to the home in the Hollywood Hills I rented from James Earl Jones!)

And let’s be under no illusions: Ansari might be wearing a lab coat, but his narrative relies on personal anecdotes about his life. (His veil of academic rigour also takes a knock when he refers to “the muscles in our brain”.) We hear that his parents had an arranged marriage, for example, and that it has been a happy one. We find that he mostly wants to do fieldwork in Japan because he loves ramen. At one point, he masturbates into a weird egg-shaped gizmo to make a point about the value of forming a connection with another human. “No matter what happens, you get a lot more out of it than you get from blowing your load into a cold, silicone egg,” he notes.

But what about the focus groups, carried out by the helpful Klinenberg? These yield some interesting, but not totally unexpected, results. Fourteen out of the 36 elderly Americans they interviewed at a retirement centre married someone who lived within walking distance of their childhood home. Their generation also married young: the average age for a first wedding was 20 for women and 23 for men. Today, those figures are 27 and 29, as marriage no longer marks the beginning of adulthood, but rather the end of our carefree (but financially independent) youth. Now, people want more from a long-term relationship than just security and companionship. They dream of finding “the one”, a person who can be friend, lover, co-parent and soulmate – and they are prepared to keep looking for longer to find that person.

There is a downside, however. Many young Americans Ansari speaks to feel they are drowning in choice. They treat relationships like just another consumer experience; they browse catalogues, weigh up the options, and eventually, maybe, take the goods on sale or return. Unsurprisingly, the quest for perfection often leads to dissatisfaction with what’s currently on offer: in one memorable anecdote, a woman recounts meeting a man on the dating app Tinder, then spending the journey to their first date swiping through the service to see if anyone better was available.

The rest of the book deals with online dating, dumping, sexting, cheating and snooping on your partner, all of which have been made easier by the rise of the smartphone and the private world we create behind its screen. This is territory already explored by theorists such as Danah Boyd and Sherry Turkle and OKCupid co-founder Christian Rudder, but Ansari helpfully masticates their findings down for a general audience. He is neither a tech evangelist nor a luddite: the gadgets might be constantly updating, but human nature is slower to change.

The international sections – Paris, Tokyo, Buenos Aires – provide useful breadth, as do his trips to smalltown America, where the dating scene is less frenetic than in the big cities. In the chapter on Japan, he briefly considers the effect that economic shifts have had on heterosexual relationships, asking whether the rise of shy “herbivore men” and professionally driven women is behind the country’s falling marriage and birth rates. This is some of the most thought-provoking material, and it made me wish Ansari had covered the equivalent changes in US society in greater detail.

Throughout the book, the comedian is reluctant to come to firm conclusions from his research, and sometimes his desire to be non-judgmental about other people’s choices makes his observations feel wishy-washy. (In one section, about stay-at-home v working mothers, he practically has a panic attack at the thought that anyone might think he had taken a side.) He is not here to tell us what to do – instead, he sees his role as a tour guide, outlining the romantic landscape, pointing out the hidden traps and keeping up a steady patter of light-hearted comments. Unfortunately, these can fall flat – the energy and charm of his standup persona often don’t translate to the page. Sometimes his asides have the architecture of jokes, but the content is oddly humourless. (As a result they can feel empty, calorie-free; the Diet Coke of comedy.) Take this riff on “mate poaching”, where a person is seduced out of a committed relationship: “This is not to be confused with ‘rhino poaching’, where someone tries to seduce a rhinoceros into a cross-species romantic tryst. Or ‘egg poaching’, where someone tries to seduce a delicious egg into their belly without overcooking it.”

I finished the book feeling that the time I’d spent with Ansari was not unpleasant, but rather unmemorable – and I wonder how he would have fared without his academic wingman. In that sense, it is not unlike many of the dates it describes: we had fun together, but I wouldn’t text him back.

• Helen Lewis is deputy editor of the New Statesman.

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