There I was, maniacally checking my phone every few minutes, going through this tornado of panic and hurt and anger all because this person hadn’t written me a short, stupid message on a dumb little phone” (5). After texting her, Ansari experienced the anxiety that many iPhone users know all too well: “The madness I was descending into wouldn’t have even existed twenty or even ten years ago. He wrote his book, Modern Romance : An Investigation, after he couldn’t figure out how and when to communicate next with Tanya, a potential new romantic interest whom he wanted to see again.
Like a bozo on a terrible first cocktail date, it falls between two stools.Like any good stand-up comedian, Aziz Ansari is an intuitive student of the human condition. It is neither quite funny enough to be a comedy or quite serious enough to be a study. It is lively and entertaining without ever being clear about who or what it is for. Those accustomed to Ansari’s stand-up – edgy, slick, a little cruel – may find him a little tamer, more eager to please in print, although the provinces and dating “bozos” (Ansari’s word for the unlucky or inept in love) come in for sharp jibes. There are nine pages of endnotes, but the footnotes are largely used for comic asides. The result is a kind of social study/textbook/ dating journal, with as many pie charts and statistics as jokes and daft Photoshop collages. Even world-famous comedians can suck at dating banter, it turns out.
And finally Ansari opened up his phone, too – printing and annotating some of the cringey texts he sent forth in hope. They set up a global forum on Reddit where they asked questions like “Has anyone started an affair through social media?” or “How long should you wait to text someone back?” They used data collected by dating sites and OkCupid and spoke to academics and anthropologists.
They scrutinised people’s texts and online dating messages. Together they embarked on a two-year research project, setting up focus groups and interviews in New York, Los Angeles and Wichita, Buenos Aires, Paris and Tokyo. Finding there was no such book, he sat down to write it, with the help of a reported $3.5m advance and Eric Klinenberg, a professor of sociology at his alma mater, New York University.
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