Modern Romance

I hadn't read anything about this book before I picked it up, so foolishly thought it would be a comedy book, maybe some funny essays or an autobiography about Aziz's love life. Instead, as the introduction laid out for me, Aziz actually teamed up with a sociologist to do legit social science experiments in order to explore modern romance. This immediately made me like Aziz even more, because people were like, you should write a funny book! And he was like, yeah, let's set up some focus groups and gather data!

Not to say this book isn't funny, because it is; it's a sociological look at dating in the modern age filtered through Aziz's voice. So it's funny, and it's enlightening. Everyone knows that dating is different now; the internet exists, women have more choices when it comes to careers and reproduction, economic and social changes mean that young adults are in school longer, living at home longer, etc. This book lays out some of those differences and what they mean for people of dating age nowadays (basically focusing on people 22-30ish, in New York, and in straight relationships). He also looks a bit at what dating looks like internationally, in Paris, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires. It's pretty fascinating. There's a lot of stuff left out, but a scope of “dating culture” in general is much too broad.

I did find interesting the fact that most people, if the person they're dating isn't really into them, would prefer that person be honest and just say sorry, not interested. But those same people, when they're not interested in someone, mostly use the “I'm really busy right now” or just ignoring them methods. So we all want people to be honest, but we are never honest. It's hinted at later that we may not actually want people to be honest. It's really telling that we tend to do the opposite of what we say we'd want in the same situation.

Also, the book itself was pretty slick. I like the cover, the pages were nice and thick, and I liked the simple blue and black text colour scheme.