Modern Romance by Ansari

Ref: Aziz Ansari (2015). Modern Romance. Penguin.

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Summary

A comically transparent look at modern romance and the associated best practices associated with online dating.
(In the past) Marriage was an economic institution in which you were given a partnership for life in terms of children and social status and succession and companionship. But now we want our partner to still give us all these things, but in addition I want you to be my best friend and my trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot, and we live twice as long. So we come to one person, and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide: Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one. Give me comfort, give me edge. Give me novelty, give me familiarity. Give me predictability, give me surprise. And we think it's a given, and toys and lingerie are going to save us with that.-Esther Perel.

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For most of the history of our species, courtship and marriage weren't really about two individuals finding love and fulfillment. Until recently, a marital union was primarily important for establishing a bond between two families. It was about achieving security- financial, social, and personal. It was about creating conditions that made it possible to survive and reproduce. This lasted almost entirely until the Industrial Revolution.
Before the 1960s, women wanted financial security while men wanted virginity and weren't concerned with deeper qualities like education or intelligence.

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The endless string of first dates where you just say the same shit over and over again in the same places starts getting tiresome. The casual scene was fun, but in between the fun, a lot of times there was emptiness.

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Two distinct kinds of love: Passionate Love and Companionate Love.
There are two ways of thinking about satisfaction. One is the passionate/companionate love hedonic view, that the best life would be the one with the most passion in it. The other is a narrative view, that the best life is about building a story.

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Your pictures are what matter most: Despite all the nuanced information that people put up on their profiles, the factor that people rely on most when preselecting a date is looks. Based on the data he reviewed, Rudder told us that he estimated that photos drive 90% of the action in online dating.
Oddly enough, for men the most effective photos are ones with animals, followed by showing off muscles (six-packs, etc), and then photos showing them doing something interesting. Outdoor, drinking, and travel photos were the least effective photo types.
Make your opening interesting and/or personal.
- No "Hey's" or "Wsup's"
- Spell Check your Messages.
- Women receive INFINITELY more messages relative to men.
- In dataclysm, Christian Rudder used actual user data from OkCupid to show that writing a standard message and then copy-pasting it to initiate conversations is 75% as effective as writing something more original. Since it's also way less demanding, Rudder says that "in terms of effort-in to results-out it always win.”

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12 Sep, 2012: Tinder, the online dating app, is developed by two undergrads and first released at USC and UCLA.-Modern Romance by Ansari.

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