#CBR7 Review #20: Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari

After reading another Cannonballer’s review of Modern Romance, I decided I had to take a look and see what it’s all about! A look at the modern dating scene from a sociological perspective mixed with personal memories, and coming from the hilarious Aziz Ansari? That sounds like it was made for me! This book was in fact quite interesting, very easy to zip through while on a couple of long car-rides, and had a light and funny voice to it overall.

But there were a couple of things that has made it fall into the 3-star category for me: for one, while the whole thing has a nice overview of facts, issues, and new things to consider in the modern dating scene (largely, technology and changing social culture, etc), I’m not really sure where the whole thing was trying to go. Is it just a research summary? Intended to help people in their dating life? Not sure how helpful it will be for me, I still feel pretty clueless, so I don’t know.

The other issue that I had was that a lot of the information and discussions presented, I honestly felt like I knew (or at least, was aware of) already. A lot of it was discussed in an interpersonal relationships course I took for my psychology degree a few years ago, even though the modern dating world wasn’t even the focus of the class, really. For instance, the new concept of “Emerging Adulthood” and how this affects individual development, culture, marriage, relationships, economics, etc is an important topic in a lot of different fields today. And I know for a fact that I’ve read about the Capilano Suspension Bridge study at least twice in various classes, so some of the things presented were really like refreshers for me. But that’s my own fault, honestly. 

What I did love, however, was how Ansari presented the information in both an informative but fun way. I couldn’t help but giggle at a number of different parts, and I just love his sense of humor. I also learned a lot about differences between certain cultures and trends in these cultures (ie, Japan), so the chapters based on focus groups conducted in different countries were highlights for me. That and any time a text conversation from a straight white boy was presented. Those always crack me up.

But in any case, I did enjoy this book and thought it was an interesting combination of personal tales and sociological research. I have yet to really read anything else like that, so it was reasonably refreshing. But perhaps the various ideas that went into the whole thing just needed a touch more direction to tie it all together and leave it feeling less like a big overview or summary.

[Be sure to visit the Cannonball Read main site!]

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