They also co-opted the audience-participation portion of Aziz Ansari’s stand-up comedy routines: For the past few years, he’s been asking singles in his audiences to surrender their cellphones so he can analyze their awkward text exchanges in front of the crowd.Īlso like The Game, Ansari’s book is rigged to appeal to the frustrated, vulnerable, and confused-in-love. Ansari teamed up with NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg for the book, and they undertook what he calls a “massive research project” into modern relationships: They scraped data from OkCupid and, staked out a corner of Reddit called Modern Romantics to attract anecdotes from around the web, and convened focus groups all over the world-of playboys in Buenos Aires, single ladies in Doha, sexually apathetic bros in Tokyo, serial adulterers in Paris, OkCupid burnouts in Los Angeles, and retired folks on the Lower East Side. Like Strauss’ 2004 best-seller, Modern Romance styles itself as a personality-driven piece of pop sociology. Modern Romance feels a bit like the sweet little brother to Neil Strauss’ The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. (Though as Ansari admits, the book largely focuses on straight people who are well-off enough to enjoy “intense and intimate relationships with their expensive smartphones.”) Modern Romance starts from the assumption that the men and women who swipe each other’s Tinders and text each other’s phones and deep-like each other’s Instagram photos in the hopes of eventually making out with one another actually have a lot in common. The 1992 classic Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus was written for a gender-neutral audience, but it rests on the premise that men and women are so dissimilar that they might as well have been born 74 million miles away from one another. Traditional dating manuals tell straight women how to convince men to commit to them ( The Rules He’s Just Not That Into You Act Like A Lady, Think Like A Man) or instruct straight men how to trick women to have sex with them ( The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed The Professional Bachelor: How to Exploit Her Inner Psycho), but few guidebooks address men and women at once. In charting this universal experience, Ansari has created something legitimately new.
The scenario he refers to as “Tanya’s silencing of 2012” unfolds in smartphones around the world every weekend, vexing texters of all genders.
Tanya ghosted on Ansari, but he is not alone.
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