The more I thought about these changes, the more I had to write this book. But I also knew that I, bozo comedian Aziz Ansari, probably couldn’t tackle this topic on my own, and I decided to reach out to some very smart people to guide me. I teamed up with the sociologist Eric Klinenberg, and we designed a massive research project, one that would require more than a year of investigation in cities across the world and involve some of the leading experts on love and romance.
Before we get into things, I want to tell you more about our project, so you know what we did—and didn’t—do. The primary source of data for this book is the research that Eric and I did during 2013 and 2014. We conducted focus groups and interviews with hundreds of people in New York City, Los Angeles, Wichita, Monroe (NY), Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Paris, and Doha. These weren’t ordinary interviews. First, we assembled diverse groups of people and wound up having incredibly personal conversations about the intimate details of their romantic lives. Second, and even more intriguing, many of the people who participated in our research volunteered to share their phones with us, so we could track their interactions through text messages, e-mails, online dating sites, and swipe apps like Tinder. This information was revelatory, because we could observe how actual romantic encounters played out in people’s lives and not just hear stories about what people remembered. Since we asked people to share so much personal information, we promised them anonymity. That means all the names of people whose stories we tell here are pseudonyms, as is standard practice in qualitative social science research.
To expand our reach beyond just those cities, we created a Modern Romantics subreddit forum on the website Reddit to ask questions and essentially conduct a massive online focus group receiving thousands of responses from around the world. (I want to give huge thanks to everyone who participated in these sessions, as the book would not have been possible without them.) So in the book, when we mention “the subreddit,” this is what we are referring to.
We also spent a long time interviewing some incredibly smart people, including eminent sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and journalists who have dedicated their careers to studying modern romance—and who were very generous with their time. Here’s a list that I’m terrified I’m going to leave someone off of: danah boyd of Microsoft; Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University; Stephanie Coontz of Evergreen State College; Pamela Druckerman of the New York Times; Kumiko Endo of the New School, who also assisted us with our research in Tokyo; Eli Finkel of Northwestern University; Helen Fisher of Rutgers University; Jonathan Haidt of NYU; Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University; Dan Savage; Natasha Schüll of MIT; Barry Schwartz of Swarthmore College; Clay Shirky of NYU; Sherry Turkle of MIT; and Robb Willer of Stanford, who also helped us design some research questions and analyze our data.
In addition to these interviews, we got access to some amazing quantitative data that we use extensively here. For the past five years, Match.com has sponsored the largest survey of American singles around, a nationally representative sample of about five thousand people with questions about all kinds of fascinating behaviors and preferences. Match generously shared it with us, and we, in turn, will share our analysis of it with you. We’ve also benefited from the goodwill of Christian Rudder and OkCupid, which has collected a treasure trove of data on how its users behave. This information has been incredibly useful, because it allows us to distinguish between what people say they want and what people actually do.
Another great source of data was Michael Rosenfeld at Stanford University, who shared material from the “How Couples Meet and Stay Together” survey, a nationally representative survey of 4,002 English-literate adults, three quarters of whom had a spouse or romantic partner. Rosenfeld, as well as another researcher, Jonathan Haidt of NYU, gave us permission to use charts that they’d developed in this book. Big thanks to them both.
With the help of all these people, Eric and I managed to cover a vast set of issues related to modern romance, but we didn’t cover everything. One thing that I definitely want you to know up front is that this book is primarily about heterosexual relationships. Early in the process Eric and I realized that if we tried to write about how all the different aspects of romance we address applied to LGBT relationships, we simply wouldn’t be able to do the topic justice without writing an entirely separate book. We do cover some issues relating to love and romance among gays and lesbians, but not at all exhaustively.
The other thing I want to say here is that most of the research we did involved speaking with middle-class people, folks who had gone to college and put off having kids until their late twenties or thirties and now have quite intense and intimate relationships with their expensive smartphones. I know that love and romance work differently in very poor and very rich communities, both in the United States and in the other countries we visited for our research. But again, Eric and I felt that studying all the variations related to class would overwhelm us, so that’s not in the book.