by Juvoni Beckford@juvoni
Before readingWhy I picked it up
I find the current dating scene in NY humorous, and as a partial participant in the scene there are a number of things I'm confused or frustrated on and was curious to hear Aziz Ansari's take on Modern Romance, expected it to be humurous, and still serious to some degree.
After readingPosted
We sure have a tendency to overcomplicate things for ourselves. I found this book painfully relevant and a necessary author and reader dialog to have. In Modern Romance, Aziz scales back from humor and tries to take the topic of dating more seriously. He partners with a Sociologist to back up some of his claims with research, but still has a narrative flow from personal experience, anecdotes, and fan-submitted questions that asked questions everyone was thinking about in the back of their mind but too afraid to ask. I didn't find this a mind-altering book and a lot of the information was common sense, but it triggered some self-awareness and a call for personal priority reevaluation.
Three reasons to read it
- Look into technologies impact on the dating scene and how people are adjusting to it.
- Ansari combines his irreverent humor with cutting-edge social science to give us an unforgettable tour of our new romantic world.
- Discussions around too many options contrasted with no options or settling down.
Notable quotesAziz AnsariMore in Quotes
Marriage was an economic institution in which you were given a partnership for life in terms of children and social status and succession and companionship. But now we want our partner to still give us all these things, but in addition I want you to be my best friend and my trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot, and we live twice as long. So we come to one person, and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide: Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one. Give me comfort, give me edge. Give me novelty, give me familiarity. Give me predictability, give me surprise. And we think it's a given, and toys and lingerie are going to save us with that. Ideally, though, we're lucky, and we find our soul mate and enjoy that life-changing mother lode of happiness. But a soul mate is a very hard thing to find.
Why do we all say we prefer honesty but rarely give that courtesy to others?
While we may think we know what we want, we're often wrong.
The world is available to us, but that may be the problem.
For me the takeaway of these stories is that, no matter how many options we seem to have on our screens, we should be careful not to lose track of the human beings behind them. We're better off spending quality time getting to know actual people than spending hours with our devices, seeing who else is out there.
Notes for this book are still being transcribed.
