In Modern Romance, Ansari combines his irreverent humor with cutting-edge social science to give us an unforgettable tour of our new romantic world.Īziz Ishmael Ansari is an American actor and comedian. The result is unlike any social science or humor book we’ve seen before. They enlisted the world’s leading social scientists, including Andrew Cherlin, Eli Finkel, Helen Fisher, Sheena Iyengar, Barry Schwartz, Sherry Turkle, and Robb Willer. They analyzed behavioral data and surveys and created their own online research forum on Reddit, which drew thousands of messages. He teamed up with NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg and designed a massive research project, including hundreds of interviews and focus groups conducted everywhere from Tokyo to Buenos Aires to Wichita. Today, people marry later than ever and spend years of their lives on a quest to find the perfect person, a soul mate.įor years, Aziz Ansari has been aiming his comic insight at modern romance, but for Modern Romance, the book, he decided he needed to take things to another level. Their families would meet and, after deciding neither party seemed like a murderer, they would get married and soon have a kid, all by the time they were twenty-four. A few decades ago, people would find a decent person who lived in their neighborhood.

In a short period of time, the whole culture of finding love has changed dramatically. Who’s Nathan? Did he just send her a photo of his penis? Should I check just to be sure?”īut the transformation of our romantic lives can’t be explained by technology alone. Some of our problems are unique to our time. “Why did this guy just text me an emoji of a pizza?” “Should I go out with this girl even though she listed Combos as one of her favorite snack foods? Combos?!” “My girlfriend just got a message from some dude named Nathan. With technology, our abilities to connect with and sort through these options are staggering. So why are so many people frustrated? Single people today have more romantic options than at any point in human history. This seems standard now, but it’s wildly different from what people did even just decades ago. We meet people, date, get into and out of relationships, all with the hope of finding someone with whom we share a deep connection.

At some point, every one of us embarks on a journey to find love.

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