Made a real effort to stick with Modern Romance and could not make it. The key take-aways were obvious and few. The aperture of choice and opportunity as relates to find a partner has expanded a great deal over the last few decades. Consequently, people (specially women with their new found freedom and financial independence) are not willing to settle for the first thing that shows up. They want to take a couple of decades (if that is what it takes) to find real love and if that that does not come to pass, stay single and enjoy that life. If you have ever had a relationship conversation with a Millennial or Gen Z individual they would have likely elucidated you to these fact in the first five minutes. The other big learning that Ansari would have us take away is the modes of communications in the dating world have changed and mostly for the worse.
Also something you can learn by observing any random set of young people who are single and trying to find a partner. Not sure why extensive research was needed for any of this. People share copious amount of detail on their dating lives online for anyone who wants to read and learn from those experiences. It appears that Ansari wanted to make a production out of his failures and mis-steps in his dating efforts (a perfectly valid way to make money) but to pretend this is more than a vanity project is a bit much. I tried to read this book in the misguided hopes of understanding the real world that J will be stepping into after college, so I can better relate to her emerging adulthood - a concept I understood in theory but have to thank this book to educate me on the terminology to describe the phenomenon.
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