Modern Romance (28 page)

This book is technically “by Aziz Ansari,” but I cannot overstate what a group effort it has been on many levels.

To begin, I must thank Mr. Eric Klinenberg. If you are a renowned sociologist and best-selling author, teaming up with a comedian to write a sociology/humor book about modern romance is not necessarily a safe or logical bet. But Eric has believed in the project and me since day one. Over the past two years, we spent an insane amount of time working together, trying to conceive and execute this project. Working so closely and intensely with someone can be a grind sometimes, but with Eric it was always fun and interesting. It also helped that when it came to food, Eric was a maximizer as well, never questioning our extended lunch breaks or grueling research to find
the
best place to eat at that moment. Eric, a million thanks, sir.

Besides Eric, the other key to pulling off this book was our many interviews, which gave us real-world experiences to draw and learn from. The book would simply not have been possible without the hundreds of people all over the world who participated in these interviews and so graciously shared the most intimate parts of their lives. This also goes for everyone who took part in our online subreddit forum. I can’t thank all of you folks enough.

We did a huge amount of research for this book, and we couldn’t have done it without the help of our great collaborators and assistants.

Matthew Wolfe, aka the Wolfe Man, has been a superstar research assistant and then some. Everything we threw at Wolfe was taken care of, no matter how weird. Whether it was tracking down classified personals from hundreds of years ago or finding someone to Photoshop pictures of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, he was on top of it. What’s more, he did it all with the utmost professionalism and good cheer, which made working on the book a lot more fun and easy than it might have been. Wolfe Man, you killed it, and we thank you.

Shelly Ronen offered crucial assistance in the early stages of the project, helping us run focus groups in New York City and doing her own interviews as well as fieldwork in Buenos Aires. Kumiko Endo gave us great support in Tokyo, recruiting people for focus groups and tutoring us on the city’s strange and fascinating romantic culture. Sonia Zmihi organized our focus groups in Paris. Gracias, arigato, merci.

Robb Willer, a sociologist at Stanford University and a fellow native South Carolinian, consulted with us throughout the research process, helping us analyze sophisticated data sets and appreciate the value of monster truck rallies in dating.

We benefited immensely from the contributions of scholars and dating experts who generously shared their time and ideas: danah boyd, Andrew Cherlin, Stephanie Coontz, Laurie Davis, Pamela Druckerman, Thomas Edwards, Eli Finkel, Helen Fisher, Jonathan Haidt, Sheena Iyengar, Dan Savage, Natasha Schüll, Barry Schwartz, Clay Shirky, and Sherry Turkle. These are all incredibly smart people and I feel lucky to have gotten to spend time with them and steal some of their wisdom.

I also want to give a special shout-out to a few people who were extremely helpful with our data. Christian Rudder, a cofounder of OkCupid, and Helen Fisher, an anthropologist and adviser to Match.com, offered us all kinds of original data from their dating sites and surveys. Victoria Taylor and Erik Martin at Reddit helped us set up the Modern Romantics subreddit, which proved to be an invaluable research tool. Michael Rosenfeld, of Stanford University, shared data from his amazing survey, “How Couples Meet and Stay Together,” and Jonathan Haidt of New York University allowed us to reproduce and take some liberties with his graphs.

Geoff Mandel is responsible for the amazing Photoshop work in the book and quickly addressed ridiculous e-mails from me that said things like “Hey Geoff, can we make the raptors in the Jurassic Park Honeymoon Suite 30% bigger and also put romantic candles on them?” Walter Green did the excellent graphs and layout. I must also give a huge thanks to Warren Fu and Crisanta Baker who helped with early concepts for the book jacket. The final jacket artwork was designed by Jay Shaw, with photography by Ruvan Wijesooriya. The limited edition’s jacket was crafted by Dawn Baille and her team at BLT.

In New York City we got logistical help from Jessica Coffey, Siera Dissmore, Victor Bautista, Sebastien Theroux, and Matthew Shawver. In Los Angeles, Honora Talbot and Dan Torson kept us in gear. Also want to shout-out the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre for helping provide venues for some of our larger focus groups, and the University Settlement for helping us arrange interviews with their seniors.

A small group of friends and colleagues read early drafts of the manuscript, and their comments helped us sharpen the final version. These folks include: Aniz Ansari, Siera Dissmore, Enrique Iglesias,
*
Jack Moore, Matt Murray, Kelefa Sanneh, Lizzie Widdicombe, Andrew Weinberg, Robb Willer, Harris Wittels, Jason Woliner, and Alan Yang.

Our agents and managers, Richard Abate, David Miner, and Dave Becky at 3Arts, Mike Berkowitz at APA (for Aziz), and Tina Bennett at William Morris (for Eric), were great advocates at every stage of the process. I also want to thank my publicist, Jodi Gottlieb, who, even though we technically have no clue what the press will be like for this project as I type this, I am so sure will work tirelessly to get the word out. I also need to thank David Cho, who does a lot of random shit very well on all fronts digital and is always down to get delicious Korean food with me. My lawyers, Jared Levine, Corinne Farley, and Ted Gerdes, who sent me awesome e-mails that said things like “You absolutely cannot say the old couple from the stock image site are ‘fucking other people’ unless you make it explicitly clear that they are
not
actually ‘fucking other people.’”

Scott Moyers, our editor at Penguin, has been incredible every step of the way. He got the concept of this book immediately, always supported it, and never tried to make it something it was not. In addition to Scott, we need to thank Ann Godoff, Mally Anderson, Akif Saifi, Hilary Roberts, Jeannette Williams, and the rest of the team at Penguin Press, who always had our backs as well.

And finally, our greatest thanks go to our own partners in modern romance.

To Kate, who endured her husband’s unexpected run as a spokesman for American singles, Eric hopes that this book has redeemed him.

To Courtney, if every person were lucky enough to have a partner as supportive, loving, caring, talented, and beautiful as you—I doubt there’d be a market for a book like this.

To Eric, this is Aziz. I hope I don’t get you in trouble with your wife because I totally
destroyed
you in the “who wrote a sweeter note to their person” contest.

Chapter 1: Searching for Your Soul Mate

1
. James H. S. Bossard, “Residential Propinquity as a Factor in Marriage Selection,”
American Journal of Sociology
38, no. 2 (1932): 219–24.

2
. John S. Ellsworth Jr., “The Relationship of Population Density to Residential Propinquity as a Factor in Marriage Selection,”
American Sociological Review
13, no. 4 (1948): 444–48.

3
. William M. Kephart, “Some Correlates of Romantic Love,”
Journal of Marriage and the Family
29, no. 3 (1967): 470–74.

4
. Stephanie Coontz,
Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage
(New York: Penguin, 2006), 7.

5
. Elizabeth Rice Allgeier and Michael W. Wiederman, “Love and Mate Selection in the 1990s,”
Free Inquiry
11, no. 3 (1991): 25–27.

6
. Esther Perel, “The Secret to Desire in a Long-Term Relationship,” TED lecture, February 2013.

7
. Casey E. Copen, Kimberly Daniels, Jonathan Vespa, and William D. Mosher, “
First Marriages in the United States: Data from the 2006–2010 National Survey of Family Growth
,”
National Health Statistics Reports
49 (2012).

8
. These numbers come from a report on Internet trends by Mary Meeker of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The report is available from the website
Quartz
at http://qz.com/214307/mary-meeker-2014-internet-trends-report-all-the-slides/.

Chapter 2: The Initial Ask

1
. The results of the survey, conducted by the communications company textPlus, are available at http://www.textplus.com/its-prom-party -time/.

2
. Ibid.

3
. The account of texting we tell here relies on Chris Gayomali, “The Text Message Turns 20: A Brief History of SMS,”
The Week
, December 3, 2012.

4
. The 2010 data are reported in David Goldman, “Your Smartphone Will Run Your Life,”
CNN.com
, October 19, 2010. The 2014 data come from Pew Research Center, “Device Ownership over Time,” Pew Research Internet Project, January 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/data-trend/mobile/cell-phone-and-smartphone-ownership-demographics/.

5
. Clive Thompson, “Clive Thompson on the Death of the Phone Call,”
Wired
, July 28, 2010.

6
. George Homans established the classic sociological “principle of least interest,” which holds that the person who is least interested in a relationship has the most power. See George Caspar Homans,
Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1961).

7
. Mike J. F. Robinson, Patrick Anselme, Adam M. Fischer, and Kent C. Berridge, “Initial Uncertainty in Pavlovian Reward Prediction Persistently Elevates Incentive Salience and Extends Sign-Tracking to Normally Unattractive Cues,”
Behavioral Brain Research
266 (2014): 119–30.

8
. Erin Whitchurch, Timothy Wilson, and Daniel Gilbert, “‘He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not . . .’ Uncertainty Can Increase Romantic Attraction,”
Psychological Science
22, no. 2 (2011): 172–75.

9
. The survey, conducted by Hunter Public Relations, can be found at http://clientnewsfeed.hunterpr.com/category/Wine-Spirits-News.aspx?page=25.

Chapter 3: Online Dating

1
. Christian Rudder,
Dataclysm:Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking)
(New York: Crown, 2014).

2
. Nathan Ensmenger, “Computer Dating in the 1960s,”
The Computer Boys
(blog), March 5, 2014.

3
. H. G. Cocks,
Classified: The Secret History of the Personal Column
(London: Random House, 2009).

4
. This story is told in Jeff Kauflin, “How Match.com’s Founder Created the World’s Biggest Dating Website—and Walked Away with Just $50,000,”
Business Insider
, December 16, 2011.

5
. John T. Cacioppo, Stephanie Cacioppo, Gian C. Gonzaga, Elizabeth L. Ogburn, and Tyler J. VanderWeele, “Marital Satisfaction and Break-ups Differ Across On-line and Off-line Meeting Venues,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
110, no. 47 (2011): 18814–19.

6
. More of this data is here: http://data.stanford.edu/hcmst. The survey oversampled gays and lesbians to make sure there were sufficient numbers to draw meaningful conclusions.

7
. Michael J. Rosenfeld and Reuben J. Thomas, “Searching for a Mate: The Rise of the Internet as a Social Intermediary,”
American Sociological Review
77, no. 4 (2012): 523–47.

8
. Aaron Smith and Maeve Duggan, “Online Dating and Relationships,” Pew Research Center, October 21, 2013.

9
. Rudder,
Dataclysm
, 70.

10
. Dan Slater,
Love in the Time of Algorithms: What Technology Does to Meeting and Mating
(New York: Current Books, 2013).

11
. Christian Rudder, “The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures,”
OkTrends
(blog), January 20, 2010, http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-4-big-myths-of-profile-pictures/.

12
. Eli J. Finkel, Paul W. Eastwick, Benjamin R. Karney, Harry T. Reis, and Susan Sprecher, “Online Dating: A Critical Analysis from the Perspective of Psychological Science,”
Psychological Science in the Public Interest
13, no. 1 (2012): 3–66.

13
. Laura Stampler, “Inside Tinder: Meet the Guys Who Turned Dating into an Addiction,”
Time
, February 6, 2014.

14
. Ann Friedman, “How Tinder Solved Online Dating for Women,”
New York
, October 10, 2013.

15
. Nick Bilton, “Tinder, the Fast-Growing Dating App, Taps an Age-Old Truth,”
New York Times
, October 29, 2014.

16
. Holly Baxter and Pete Cashmore, “Tinder: The Shallowest Dating App Ever?”
Guardian
, November 22, 2013.

17
. Velvet Garvey, “9 Rules for Expats in Qatar,” Matador Network, July 28, 2012.

Chapter 4: Choice and Options

1
. Sheena S. Iyengar, Rachael E. Wells, and Barry Schwartz, “Doing Better but Feeling Worse: Looking for the ‘Best’ Job Undermines Satisfaction,”
Psychological Science
17, no. 2 (2006): 143–50.

2
. Sheena S. Iyengar and Mark R. Lepper, “When Choice Is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
79, no. 6 (2000): 995.

3
. On the age of first marriage by state, see Population Reference Bureau, “Median Age at First Marriage for Women (5-Year ACS),” http://www.prb.org/DataFinder/Topic/Rankings.aspx?ind=133. On the rising divorce rate in small towns and rural areas, see Sabrina Tavernise and Robert Gebeloff, “Once Rare in Rural America, Divorce Is Changing the Face of Its Families,”
New York Times,
March 23, 2011.

4
. Donald G. Dutton and Arthur P. Aron, “Some Evidence for Heightened Sexual Attraction Under Conditions of High Anxiety,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
30, no. 4 (1974): 510.

5
. Arthur Aron, Christina C. Norman, Elaine N. Aron, Colin McKenna, and Richard E. Heyman, “Couples’ Shared Participation in Novel and Arousing Activities and Experienced Relationship Quality,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
78, no. 2 (2000): 273.

6
. Paul W. Eastwick and Lucy L. Hunt, “Relational Mate Value: Consensus and Uniqueness in Romantic Evaluations,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
106, no. 5 (2014): 728–51.

7
. Paul W. Eastwick and Lucy L. Hunt, “So You’re Not Desirable,”
New York Times
, May 16, 2014.

Chapter 5: International Investigations of Love

1
. Lindsey Galloway, “Living In: The World’s Best Cities for Dating,” BBC.com, June 16, 2014.

2
. Abigail Haworth, “Why Have Young People in Japan Stopped Having Sex?”
Guardian
, October 20, 2013.

3
. National Institute on Population and Social Security Research, “The Fourteenth Japanese National Fertility Survey,” 2010.

4
. An English-language summary of these findings can be found at “30% of Single Japanese Men Have Never Dated a Woman,”
Japan Crush
(blog), April 3, 2013.

5
. Roland Buerk, “Japan Singletons Hit Record High,” BBC.com, November 28, 2011.

6
. If you can read Japanese, see http://www.stat.go.jp/data/kokusei/2005/sokuhou/01.htm.

7
. “Survey Finds Growing Number of Couples Turned Off by Sex,”
Asahi Shimbun
, December 21, 2012.

8
. Central Intelligence Agency, “The World Factbook,” 2014, available at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2054rank.html.

9
. Linda Sieg, “Population Woes Crowd Japan,”
Japan Times
, June 21, 2014.

10
. A rundown of the Japanese government’s marriage-support initiatives can be found in Keiko Ujikane and Kyoko Shimodo, “Abe Funds Japan’s Last-Chance Saloon to Arrest Drop in Births,” Bloomberg, March 19, 2014.

11
. Kalman Applbaum, “Marriage with the Proper Stranger: Arranged Marriage in Metropolitan Japan,”
Ethnology
34, no. 1 (1995): 37–51. Also see David Millward, “Arranged Marriages Make Comeback in Japan,”
Telegraph
, April 16, 2012.

12
. Masami Ito, “Marriage Ever-Changing Institution,”
Japan Times
, November 3, 2009.

13
. Alexandra Harney, “The Herbivore’s Dilemma,”
Slate
, June 15, 2009.

14
. National Institute on Population and Social Security Research, “Fourteenth Japanese National Fertility Survey,” October-November 2011.

15
. There’s a totally fascinating video from
Vice
on the Japanese love industry that’s available at www.vice.com/the-vice-guide-to-travel/the-japanese-love-industry.

16
. If you’re interested in hostess clubs, there’s a whole anthropology book about them. Anne Allison,
Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

17
. The data on men’s use of prostitution is assembled in “Percentage of Men (by Country) Who Paid for Sex at Least Once: The Johns Chart,” ProCon.org, January 6, 2011. It can be found at http://prostitution.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=004119.

18
. The mayor’s statements and the 60 percent figure can be found in Tara Brady, “‘Women Who Say They Don’t Like Cat-Calls Are Lying’: Buenos Aires Mayor Sparks Furious Backlash,”
Daily Mail
, April 29, 2014.

Chapter 6: Old Issues, New Formats: Sexting, Cheating, Snooping, and Breaking Up

1
. These statistics come from a few sources: The data on sending and receiving sexts are in Hanna Rosin, “Why Kids Sext,”
Atlantic,
November 2014. The data on iPhone users versus Android users, on Tuesday-morning sexting, and on people in relationships sexting come from the Match.com survey we draw on throughout the book.

2
. Jenna Wortham, “Everybody Sexts,”
Matter
, November 11, 2014.

3
. Rosin, “Why Kids Sext.”

4
. Oliver Tree, “‘Stop Starin at My Weapon’: Hilarious New Details of Weiner’s Sordid Facebook ‘Affair’ with Blackjack Dealer Are Revealed,”
Daily Mail
, June 8, 2011, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2000386/Anthony-Weiner-Facebook-affair-blackjack-dealer-Lisa-Weiss-revealed.html.

5
. The 2011 figure is reported in Sheelah Kolhatkar, “Cheating, Incorporated,”
Bloomberg Businessweek
, February 10, 2011. The 2014 figure is on Ashley Madison’s website. See https://www.ashleymadison.com/blog/about-us/.

6
. Deni Kirkova, “You’re Breaking Up with Me by TEXT?”
Daily Mail
, March 5, 2014.

7
. Ilana Gershon,
The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).

8
. Rossalyn Warren, “A Girl Is Getting over Her Ex by Photoshopping Photos of Beyoncé Over His Face,” BuzzFeed, July 29, 2014.

9
. Irene Tsapelas, Helen Fisher, and Arthur Aron, “Infidelity: When, Where, Why,” in William R. Cupach and Brian H. Spitzberg,
The Dark Side of Close Relationships II
(New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 175–96.

10
. Richard Wike, “French More Accepting of Infidelity Than People in Other Countries,” Pew Research Center, January 14, 2014.

11
. Frank Newport and Igor Himelfarb, “In U.S., Record-High Say Gay, Lesbian Relations Morally OK,” Gallup.com, May 20, 2013.

12
. Henry Samuel, “French Study Shows a Majority of Men and a Third of Women Cheat,”
Telegraph
, January 21, 2014.

Chapter 7: Settling Down

1
. Helen Fisher, “How to Make Romance Last,”
O, the Oprah Magazine
, December 2009.

2
. Philip N. Cohen, “Marriage Is Declining Globally: Can You Say That?”
Family Inequality
(blog), June 12, 2013.

3
. Christina Sterbenz, “Marriage Rates Are Near Their Lowest Levels in History—Here’s Why,”
Business Insider
, May 7, 2014.

4
. Andrew J. Cherlin, “In the Season of Marriage, a Question: Why Bother?”
New York Times
, April 27, 2013.

5
. Mark Oppenheimer, “Marriage, with Infidelities,”
New York Times
, June 30, 2011.

6
. Mimi Valdes, “Do Open Relationships Work?”
Men’s Fitness
, October 2007.