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walkitoutAziz Ansari is apparently a comedian. It's entirely possible I've seen him somewhere at some point, but I don't remember one way or the other. Eric Klinenberg is a sociologist. Ansari wrote a book about the State of Dating, and Klinenberg was a big part of the research process. They did a ton of focus group work here and in Paris, Buenos Aires and Tokyo. Also, some insight from places like Qatar.
If you _are_ currently looking, the book is probably some combination of comforting and helpful. The author(s) manage to walk a narrow path between pretending the games of dating are a Good Idea and Here's How to Win and a Terrible Idea and You Should Just Be Honest/Yourself/WTF. They spend some time talking to older people about what dating has been like in various places in the past, putting them in a good place to compare/contrast with the present in different regions. I'm a little sad/disappointed that they didn't do anything overt in understanding class differences in dating then/now/here/elsewhere, but this is a humorous overview of dating in the US currently, so not too surprising.
They limited scope to hetero right from the beginning, altho they occasionally made observations about other groups (notably, Grindr preceding Tinder by so long, failed attempts to come up with a Grindr for hets and why Tinder worked when its predecessors failed). There's a great opportunity in the Tinder story for someone to explore various stages in adoption curves, but asking that in this context would be insane.
Ansari winds up about where you would expect: get off the phone and meeting people face to face relatively quickly. We're wired up to assess each other in person, and you can spend forever and just exhaust yourself texting. He also advocates for spending more time (3-5th meets) with people who are a 6 or above, because most people have something going on that isn't apparent immediately and if you are looking for getting hit hard with LUUURVE on a first date you are going to be perpetually disappointed (exhausted, etc.). He spent a bunch of time talking to Barry Schwartz, so he has a good grasp of the perils of Endless Choice and he does a nice job of showing how even people who in the past would have been lucky have one or two choices now have hundreds a month online.
Ansari has a dippy sense of humor, but he deploys it well. All the "tum-tum" and food focus could get old, but instead it builds naturally into how he came to be with the woman he loves. He does have a relatively traditional perspective, but he winds the book up in a chapter on monogamish in which he manages to step slightly out of the relentless Find the One perspective.
It was a fast read, unusually well-researched, humorous and very likable. This topic is very easy to be overly judgmental on -- and it's also easy to be _so_ open minded that you fail to acknowledge clear awfulness (Argentina apparently is an entire country full of people with anxious-avoidant attachment styles. Who knew?). Ansari finds a good balance.
I wasn't _looking_ for a book about dating when I stumbled across this one, so even if you are never gonna be Out There again, I really encourage you to give this a try. It'll help you make sense of what your single friends (grandchildren, etc.) are talking about, and may even give you the ability to frame Your Wisdom in a way that is accessible to them.
If you _are_ Out There, and you read this, I'd particularly love to hear what you think about how well he captured the current experience.
ETA: Oh, and Happy Valentine's Day, whatever your relationship status!
ETA: 17 Jan 2018, so quite a bit of time has gone by since reading this. Recently, a young woman has come out and said she went on a date with Aziz Ansari and he behaved extremely badly.
https://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari-28355
I had several reactions to reading this piece. First, and most importantly, everything about this description of Ansari’s behavior fits _very_ well into my sense of how male serial daters behave. When I wrote the above review, it was based on a sense that Ansari had moved from “serial dater” status to “in a LTR” status. However, it has since become clear that that relationship ended probably around or not too long after I wrote that review. And then some time went by, and time does not make serial daters better people. (Therapy and a break from dating makes serial daters better people.)
Second, I first heard about this article because someone over at Headline News (really? That still exists? Is that what retired people who don’t watch CNBC or CNN watch these days?) attacked the author of the piece and/or the person who had the Really Bad Evening with Ansari. We are in a phase where a _lot_ of people are trying to get some traction on fretting about mistargeting / don’t endanger the MeToo movement, etc. I wanted to read the article to see whether I thought there was any risk that this article was an example of mistargeting. I don’t. I think that babe.net (I poked around a little) is pretty diligent. And the people they are going after are much younger, and therefore it will be harder to find and get multiple victims to come forward (a la Weinstein, Spacey, etc.) which is how we have become confident that the target is justified. Younger targets such as Ansari are also explicitly connecting themselves to the MeToo movement, which can make it substantially more difficult for victims to even believe that what is happening / what happened to them is actually happening / happened. When someone you like and look up to treats you badly, you don’t _instantly_ recognize it for what it is — you try to imagine some scenario of misunderstanding or WTF.
Finally, a number of people have objected to MeToo on the thesis that it will Ruin Dating / Romance / No One Will Ever Get Laid Again. The description of the evening in question reveals just how insanely compressed Ansari’s timeline was. This was an attempt at _sex on the first date_, with a 10+ year age difference. This is not normal behavior. And it is definitely _not_ romance. Anyone committed to immediate sex should probably go through an app that has settings to support that kind of search and/or expect to pay.
I’m profoundly annoyed that Ansari’s actions at this point in his dating career are looking suspiciously PUA like. The book _was_ funny, and had some great perspective. I hope he can take the time to become a better person capable of relating to other people in a way that better balances what he wants and what the other person wants. He is 1-2 more first person accounts of Very Bad Dates away from a forever end to his career.
Good for “Grace” for coming forward. Good for Katie for doing such a great job writing the piece. And slamming the woman at HLN was a completely reasonable thing to do. That wasn’t a slam at the HLN anchor’s age — it was a comment about the demographics of the HLN audience. There is a very real chance that women above a certain age will listen to what happened to “Grace” and blame Grace for all of it. Those women are part of the problem.
If you _are_ currently looking, the book is probably some combination of comforting and helpful. The author(s) manage to walk a narrow path between pretending the games of dating are a Good Idea and Here's How to Win and a Terrible Idea and You Should Just Be Honest/Yourself/WTF. They spend some time talking to older people about what dating has been like in various places in the past, putting them in a good place to compare/contrast with the present in different regions. I'm a little sad/disappointed that they didn't do anything overt in understanding class differences in dating then/now/here/elsewhere, but this is a humorous overview of dating in the US currently, so not too surprising.
They limited scope to hetero right from the beginning, altho they occasionally made observations about other groups (notably, Grindr preceding Tinder by so long, failed attempts to come up with a Grindr for hets and why Tinder worked when its predecessors failed). There's a great opportunity in the Tinder story for someone to explore various stages in adoption curves, but asking that in this context would be insane.
Ansari winds up about where you would expect: get off the phone and meeting people face to face relatively quickly. We're wired up to assess each other in person, and you can spend forever and just exhaust yourself texting. He also advocates for spending more time (3-5th meets) with people who are a 6 or above, because most people have something going on that isn't apparent immediately and if you are looking for getting hit hard with LUUURVE on a first date you are going to be perpetually disappointed (exhausted, etc.). He spent a bunch of time talking to Barry Schwartz, so he has a good grasp of the perils of Endless Choice and he does a nice job of showing how even people who in the past would have been lucky have one or two choices now have hundreds a month online.
Ansari has a dippy sense of humor, but he deploys it well. All the "tum-tum" and food focus could get old, but instead it builds naturally into how he came to be with the woman he loves. He does have a relatively traditional perspective, but he winds the book up in a chapter on monogamish in which he manages to step slightly out of the relentless Find the One perspective.
It was a fast read, unusually well-researched, humorous and very likable. This topic is very easy to be overly judgmental on -- and it's also easy to be _so_ open minded that you fail to acknowledge clear awfulness (Argentina apparently is an entire country full of people with anxious-avoidant attachment styles. Who knew?). Ansari finds a good balance.
I wasn't _looking_ for a book about dating when I stumbled across this one, so even if you are never gonna be Out There again, I really encourage you to give this a try. It'll help you make sense of what your single friends (grandchildren, etc.) are talking about, and may even give you the ability to frame Your Wisdom in a way that is accessible to them.
If you _are_ Out There, and you read this, I'd particularly love to hear what you think about how well he captured the current experience.
ETA: Oh, and Happy Valentine's Day, whatever your relationship status!
ETA: 17 Jan 2018, so quite a bit of time has gone by since reading this. Recently, a young woman has come out and said she went on a date with Aziz Ansari and he behaved extremely badly.
https://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari-28355
I had several reactions to reading this piece. First, and most importantly, everything about this description of Ansari’s behavior fits _very_ well into my sense of how male serial daters behave. When I wrote the above review, it was based on a sense that Ansari had moved from “serial dater” status to “in a LTR” status. However, it has since become clear that that relationship ended probably around or not too long after I wrote that review. And then some time went by, and time does not make serial daters better people. (Therapy and a break from dating makes serial daters better people.)
Second, I first heard about this article because someone over at Headline News (really? That still exists? Is that what retired people who don’t watch CNBC or CNN watch these days?) attacked the author of the piece and/or the person who had the Really Bad Evening with Ansari. We are in a phase where a _lot_ of people are trying to get some traction on fretting about mistargeting / don’t endanger the MeToo movement, etc. I wanted to read the article to see whether I thought there was any risk that this article was an example of mistargeting. I don’t. I think that babe.net (I poked around a little) is pretty diligent. And the people they are going after are much younger, and therefore it will be harder to find and get multiple victims to come forward (a la Weinstein, Spacey, etc.) which is how we have become confident that the target is justified. Younger targets such as Ansari are also explicitly connecting themselves to the MeToo movement, which can make it substantially more difficult for victims to even believe that what is happening / what happened to them is actually happening / happened. When someone you like and look up to treats you badly, you don’t _instantly_ recognize it for what it is — you try to imagine some scenario of misunderstanding or WTF.
Finally, a number of people have objected to MeToo on the thesis that it will Ruin Dating / Romance / No One Will Ever Get Laid Again. The description of the evening in question reveals just how insanely compressed Ansari’s timeline was. This was an attempt at _sex on the first date_, with a 10+ year age difference. This is not normal behavior. And it is definitely _not_ romance. Anyone committed to immediate sex should probably go through an app that has settings to support that kind of search and/or expect to pay.
I’m profoundly annoyed that Ansari’s actions at this point in his dating career are looking suspiciously PUA like. The book _was_ funny, and had some great perspective. I hope he can take the time to become a better person capable of relating to other people in a way that better balances what he wants and what the other person wants. He is 1-2 more first person accounts of Very Bad Dates away from a forever end to his career.
Good for “Grace” for coming forward. Good for Katie for doing such a great job writing the piece. And slamming the woman at HLN was a completely reasonable thing to do. That wasn’t a slam at the HLN anchor’s age — it was a comment about the demographics of the HLN audience. There is a very real chance that women above a certain age will listen to what happened to “Grace” and blame Grace for all of it. Those women are part of the problem.
Aziz
Date: 2016-02-15 03:24 am (UTC)