Aziz Ansari Modern Romance Quotes

Like most fedora wearers, he had a lot of inexplicable confidence.

Why do we all say we prefer honesty but rarely give that courtesy to others?

When I've really been in love with someone, it's not because they looked a certain way or liked a certain TV show or a certain cuisine. It's more because when I watched a certain TV show or ate a certain cuisine with them, it was the most fun thing ever.

In a sense we are all like a Flo Rida song: The more time you spend with us, the more you see how special we are. Social scientists refer to this as the Flo Rida Theory of Acquired Likability Through Repetition.

To be honest, I tend to romanticize the past, and though I appreciate all the conveniences of modern life, sometimes I yearn for simpler times.

There's not a dating service on this planet that can do what the human brain can do in terms of finding the right person.

The world is available to us, but that may be the problem.

I hope you aren’t holding an ice cream cone against your chest, ’cause your heart just warmed—and your ice cream just melted.

If passionate love is the coke of love, companionate love is like having a glass of wine or smoking a few hits of some mild weed.

While we may think we know what we want, we’re often wrong.

Your most casual encounter could lead to something bigger, so treat those interactions with that level of respect.

No matter how many options we have, the real challenge is figuring out how to evaluate them.

As a medium, it’s safe to say, texting facilitates flakiness and rudeness and many other personality traits that would not be expressed in a phone call or an in-person interaction.

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. Ideally, though, we’re lucky, and we find our soul mate and enjoy that life-changing mother lode of happiness. But a soul mate is a very hard thing to find.

Unlike phone calls, which bind two people in real-time conversations that require at least some shared interpretation of the situation, communication by text has no predetermined temporal sequencing and lots of room for ambiguity. Did I just use the phrase “predetermined temporal sequencing”? Fuck yeah, I did.

For me the takeaway of these stories is that, no matter how many options we seem to have on our screens, we should be careful not to lose track of the human beings behind them. We’re better off spending quality time getting to know actual people than spending hours with our devices, seeing who else is out there.

Finding someone today is probably more complicated and stressful than it was for previous generations—but you’re also more likely to end up with someone you are really excited about.

The most popular time to sext is Tuesday between 10:00 A.M. and noon. Yes, we looked this up twice. Strange!

There are no longer any predetermined life paths. Each of us is on our own.

We want something that’s very passionate, or boiling, from the get-go. In the past, people weren’t looking for something boiling; they just needed some water. Once they found it and committed to a life together, they did their best to heat things up. Now, if things aren’t boiling, committing to marriage seems premature.

firm takeaway from all our interviews with women is that most dudes out there are straight-up bozos.

People who own iPhones are twice as likely to sext as people who use Androids.

These people invented emojis, for god’s sake! They were texting and they thought, Yeah, this is great, but it’d be really dope to be able to send a small image of a koala bear too.*

That’s the thing about the Internet: It doesn’t simply help us find the best thing out there; it has helped to produce the idea that there is a best thing and, if we search hard enough, we can find it. And in turn there are a whole bunch of inferior things that we’d be foolish to choose.

too many people spend way too much time doing the online part of online dating, not the dating part.

True love? This guy has a job and a decent mustache. Lock it down, girl.

After the rings, the priest should just say, “Enjoy it, bing-bongs. Due to our brain’s tendency toward hedonic adaptation, you won’t feel quite this giddy in a few years. All right, where’s the pigs in a blanket? I’m outta here.

I entered the word “crisis” into Thesaurus.com, it suggested “hot potato” as a synonym. I could not write this book without letting you know that Thesaurus.com lists “hot potato” as a synonym for “crisis.

We each sit alone, staring at this black screen with a whole range of emotions. But in a strange way, we are all doing it together, and we should take solace in the fact that no one has a clue what’s going on.

We have two selves: a real-world self and a phone self, and the nonsense our phone selves do can make our real-world selves look like idiots. Our real-world selves and our phone selves go hand in hand. Act like a dummy with your phone self and send some thoughtless message full of spelling errors, and the real-world self will pay the price. The person on the other end sees no difference between your two selves. They never think, Oh, I’m sure he’s much more intelligent and thoughtful in person. This is just his “lazy phone persona.

Sometimes there’s another reason that people take so long to text you back: They aren’t playing mind games or busy. They’re just GOOGLING THE FUCK OUT OF YOU.

Our romantic options are unprecedented and our tools to sort and communicate with them are staggering. And that raises the question: Why are so many people frustrated?

Today we’ve become far more accepting of alternative lifestyles, and people move in and out of different situations: single with roommates, single and solo, single with partner, married, divorced, divorced and living with an iguana, remarried with iguana, then divorced with seven iguanas because your iguana obsession ruined your relationship, and, finally, single with six iguanas (Arturo was sadly run over by an ice cream truck).

Want to know what’s filling up the phones of nearly every single woman? It’s this: “Hey,” “Hey!” Heyyy!!” “Hey what’s going?” “Wsup,” “Wsup!” “What’s going on?” “Whatcha up to?

what stranger can compete with a video that documents the budding friendship of two baby hippopotamuses? No one, that’s who.

Basically, we see something as more desirable when it is less available.

Often, when you’re out in the single world meeting people, you meet someone you like, get their number, and put it right in your phone, transforming them into an ‘option’ that lives in your device. Sometimes you and that option engage in some phone-based interaction and you meet up in person. But sometimes that exchange never happens. That potentially cool, exciting person dies there, buried in your phone.

Think about where you grew up as a kid, your apartment building or your neighborhood. Could you imagine being married to one of those clowns?

...being asked out through a text message has become so banal that it no longer gives women that sense of flattery.

Even if you say you “don’t play games,” that is a type of game—it is the “I don’t play games” game.

A century ago people would find a decent person who lived in their neighborhood. Their families would meet and, after they decided neither party seemed like a murderer, the couple would get married and have a kid, all by the time they were twenty-two. Today people spend years of their lives on a quest to find the perfect person, a soul mate.

Carol, I can’t describe how you make me feel. Wait, no, I can—you make my mind release pleasure-inducing neurotransmitters and you’ve flooded my mind with dopamine. If the experience of snorting cocaine and getting so high out of my mind that I want to climb a telephone pole with my bare hands just to see if I can do it were a person, it would be you.

This kind of rigor goes into a lot of my decision making. Whether it’s where I’m eating, where I’m traveling, or, god forbid, something I’m buying, I feel compelled to do a lot of research to make sure I’m getting the best.  • • •  At certain times, though, this “I need the best” mentality can be debilitating. I wish I could just eat somewhere that looks good and be happy with my choice. But I can’t. The problem is that I know somewhere there is a perfect meal for me and I have to do however much research I can to find it.

There is no official guidebook anywhere on texting yet, but a cultural consensus has slowly formed in regard to texts. Some basic rules: • Don’t text back right away. You come off like a loser who has nothing going on. • If you write to someone, don’t text them again until you hear from them. • The amount of text you write should be of a similar length to what the other person has written to you. • Carrying this through, if your messages are in blue and the other person’s messages are green, if there is a shit ton more blue than green in your conversation, this person doesn’t give a shit about you. • The person who receives the last message in a convo WINS!

The key, Dinesh said, is to have friends who hang out in different groups in different places, and to mix up the nights so that you’re spending some time with all of them. Whether it’s in church, with volunteer groups, at office parties, or on a sports field, it’s always a place where people meet organically.

But we want more than love. We want a lifelong wingman/wingwoman who completes us and can handle the truth, to mix metaphors from three different Tom Cruise movies.

Another idea from social psychology that goes into our texting games is the scarcity principle. Basically, we see something as more desirable when it is less available. When you are texting someone less frequently, you are, in effect, creating a scarcity of you and making yourself more attractive.

If you were in a bar, would you ever go up to a guy or girl and repeat the word "hey" without getting a response? Would you ever go up to a woman you met two minutes ago and beg her to show you one of your boobs? And do you really want to bone someone who responds to this?

Making sure the person shared your interest in sushi and Wes Anderson movies and made you get a boner anytime you touched her hair would seem far too picky. Of course, people did get married because they loved each other, but their expectations about what love would bring were different from those we hold today.

When the older folks I interviewed described the reasons that they dated, got engaged to, and then married their eventual spouses, they'd say things like "He seemed like a pretty good guy," "She was a nice girl;" "He had a good job," and "She had access to doughnuts and I like doughnuts.

As we see more and more people online, it can get difficult to remember that behind every text message, OkCupid profile, and Tinder picture there's an actual living, breathing, complex person, just like you.

Initially, we are attracted to people by their physical appearance and traits we can quickly recognize. But the things that really make us fall for someone are their deeper, more unique qualities, and usually those only come out during sustained interactions.

Sheena Iyengar, a Columbia University professor who specializes in research on choice, put it to me another way: “People are not products,” she said bluntly. “But, essentially, when you say, ‘I want a guy that’s six foot tall and has blah, blah, blah characteristics,’ you’re treating a human being like one.

There’s something uniquely valuable in everyone, and we’ll be much happier and better off if we invest the time and energy it takes to find it. But seriously, if the person doesn’t clip their toenails or wear clean socks, look elsewhere. There are plenty of options.

when we have more options, we are actually less satisfied and sometimes even have a harder time making a choice at all.

Too busy to write me back, but she has time to post a photo of some deer she saw on a hike?

At one point during a focus group with older women, I asked them straight out whether a lot of women their age got married just to get out of the house. Every single woman there nodded.

Schwartz is an encyclopedia of psychological research on choice problems. If asked to give a quote about him for the back of a book cover, I would say, “This motherfucker knows choice.” As

Companionate love is neurologically different from passionate love. Passionate love always spikes early, then fades away, while companionate love is less intense but grows over time. And, whereas passionate love lights up the brain’s pleasure centers, companionate love is associated with the regions having to do with long-term bonding and relationships. Anthropologist Helen Fisher, the author of Anatomy of Love and one of the most cited scholars in the study of sex and

We repeatedly found that one text can change the whole dynamic of a budding relationship. ... When I spoke with Sherry Turkle about this, she said that texting, unlike an in-person conversation, is not a forgiving medium for mistakes. In a face-to-face conversation, people can read each other’s body language, facial expressions, and tones of voice. If you say something wrong, you have the cues to sense it and you have a moment to recover or rephrase before it makes a lasting impact. Even on the phone you can hear a change in someone’s voice or a pause to let you know how they are interpreting what you’ve said. In text, your mistake just sits there marinating on the other person’s screen, leaving a lasting record of your ineptitude and bozoness.

How do we figure out when to call, when to text, and when to just drop everything, stand outside someone’s window, and serenade them with your favorite nineties R&B tune, perhaps “All My Life” by K-Ci & JoJo?

If this mentality has so pervaded our decision making, then it stands to reason that it is also affecting our search for a romantic partner, especially if it’s going to be long-term. In a sense, it already has. Remember: We are no longer the generation of the “good enough” marriage. We are now looking for our soul mates. And even after we find our soul mates, if we start feeling unhappy, we get divorced.

Waiting for true love was a luxury that many, especially women, could not afford.

Nowadays the Internet is my chubby friend.

made me wonder whether our ability and desire to interact with strangers is another muscle that risks atrophy in the smartphone world.

One reason it’s so hard to imagine marrying the people we grew up with is that these days we marry much later than people in previous generations.

Today, if you own a smartphone, you’re carrying a 24-7 singles bar in your pocket.

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.

If you are in a big city or on an online dating site, you are flooded with options. Seeing all these options, like the people in the job example, are we now comparing our potential partners not to other potential partners but rather to an idealized person whom no one could measure up to?

On a side note, is there any place on earth that sounds like it has a more chill vibe than Hawaiian Brian’s? Or for that matter, is there a chiller name than “Hawaiian Brian”? “Damnit! Hawaiian Brian just stole my debit card and liquidated all my bank accounts!” I can’t ever see someone having to utter that sentence.

Among the older lovers, brain regions associated with anxiety were no longer active; instead, there was activity in the areas associated with calmness.”1 Neurologically it’s similar to the kind of love you feel for an old friend or a family member.

If you were a woman, you had far less time to find a man. True love? This guy has a job and a decent mustache. Lock it down, girl.  •

he just seemed to be comfortable with himself and not particularly shy. Like most fedora wearers, he had a lot of inexplicable confidence.

asking a new person to go on a romantic outing has never been easy. It means declaring your attraction to someone and putting yourself out there in a huge way, while risking the brutal possibility of rejection—or, in the modern era, even an unexplained, icy-cold silence.

This is my favorite. I just love the idea of the guy opening up his phone, seeing the boobs, and thinking, “Ahhhh. Okay, you got this, Phil! Let’s nail this PowerPoint presentation.

that younger people are so used to text-based communications, where they have time to gather their thoughts and precisely plan what they are going to say, that they are losing their ability to have spontaneous conversation. She argues that the muscles in our brain that help us with spontaneous conversation are getting less exercise in the text-filled world, so our skills are declining. When we did the large focus group where we split the room by generation—kids on the left, parents on the right—a strange thing happened. Before the show started, we noticed that the parents’ side of the room was full of chatter. People were talking to one another and asking how they had ended up at the event and getting to know people. On the kids’ side, everyone was buried in their phones and not talking to anyone around them.

One of the problems with the first date is that you know very little about a person, so you overweight those few things that you do know,’ the anthropologist and dating guru Helen Fisher told me. ‘And suddenly you see they’ve got brown shoes, and you don’t like brown shoes, so they’re out. Or they don’t like your haircut, so they’re out. But if you were to get to know each other more, those particular characteristics might begin to recede in importance, as you also found that they had a great sense of humor or they’d love to go fishing in the Caribbean with you.

Do I call? Do I text? Do I send a Facebook message? Do I send up a smoke signal? How does one do that? Will I set my rented house on fire? How embarrassed will I be when I have to tell the home’s owner, actor James Earl Jones, that I burned his house down trying to send a smoke signal?

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.6

He said, “A lot of times you’re in these situations and you second-guess the things you said, did, or wrote, but sometimes it just has to do with something on their end that you have no clue about.

Another poll, from Gallup, found that infidelity is more universally disapproved of than polygamy, animal cloning, and suicide.11 So if there were two guys at a bar, one cheating on his wife and another with a cloned pig named Bootsie, it would be the cheater, not Bootsie the pig, getting more disapproving looks.

being asked out through a text message has become so banal that it no longer gives women that sense of flattery. As far as they know, the guy who has sent the message is hitting up lots of women and waiting to see who writes back. Unless he has sent something truly distinctive and personal, a text just isn’t all that meaningful.

During his first big television interview, Kremen wore a tie-dyed shirt, sat on a brightly colored beanbag chair, and boldly told the camera: “Match .com will bring more love to the planet than anything since Jesus Christ.”4

My interest in this started one night when I was doing stand-up in a small club in New York. I was talking about texting and I asked for a volunteer who’d met someone recently and had been texting back and forth with them. I read the back-and-forth messages of one gentleman and made jokes about how we were all dealing with some version of this nonsense. I quickly noticed that one woman seemed very puzzled. I asked her why she looked so bewildered, and she explained that this was something that just didn’t happen in France, where she was from. This kind of back-and-forth simply didn’t exist, she claimed. I asked her, “Okay, well, what would a guy in France text you, if you met him at a bar?” She said, “He would write . . . ‘Fancy a fuck?’” And I said, “Whoa. What would you write back?” She said, “I would write yes or no depending on whether I fancied one or not.” I was stunned—that kind of makes so much more sense, right?

Now you can be in bed with your spouse and ask, “Hey, honey, what are you looking at on your phone?” She could reply, “Oh, just reading this op-ed in the Times,” when she’s actually sending your neighbor a photo of her Mrs. Pouterson.

When you found someone you liked, you jumped into a relationship. I don’t think we thought, Well, there are another twelve doors or another seventeen doors or another four hundred and thirty-three doors,” she said. “We saw a door we wanted, and so we took it.” Now, look at my generation. We’re in a hallway with millions of doors. That’s a lot of doors.

But let’s all realize we are in the same boat dealing with the same shit. So if you aren’t into someone, before just ignoring them, try to be mindful of how frustrating it is to be on the other side of that and maybe try crafting them an honest message or, at the least, lie and say: “Hey, sorry, working on my debut rap album, Fantabulous, so gonna be in the studio nonstop and need to focus, not dating at the moment. I’m very flattered though and you are a great person, all the best.”  •

We want something that’s very passionate, or boiling, from the get-go. In the past, people weren’t looking for something boiling; they just needed some water. Once they found it and committed to a life together, they did their best to heat things up. Now, if things aren’t boiling, committing to marriage seems premature. But searching for a soul mate takes a long time and requires enormous emotional investment. The problem is that this search for the perfect person can generate a lot of stress. Younger generations face immense pressure to find the “perfect person” that simply didn’t exist in the past when “good enough” was good enough.

Some thought you should double but occasionally throw in a quick response to not seem so regimented (nothing too long, though!). Some people swore by waiting 1.25 times longer. Others argued they found three minutes to be just right. There were also those who were so fed up with the games that they thought receiving timely responses free of games was refreshing and showed confidence.

The temptation to continue to creep on your ex over the Internet is nearly universal. One study found that 88 percent of those who continued to have access to their ex’s Facebook page said they sometimes monitored their ex’s activities, while 70 percent of people who had disconnected from an ex admitted to trying to spy on the ex’s page by other means, such as through a friend’s account.

I am a sexually confident woman who made a video for someone she cared about. If someone I knew saw the images and judged me negatively for making them, I feel confident that the problem is with them, not with me... So when I sext with my boyfriend, the main goal is to get us off. But it's also my little way of reassuring myself that I decide what to do with my body, and I get to decide which risky behaviors are worth taking.

The problem is that this search for the perfect person can generate a lot of stress. Younger generations face immense pressure to find the “perfect person” that simply didn’t exist in the past when “good enough” was good enough. When they’re successful, though, the payoff is incredible.

Monroe is about sixty miles outside of New York City. It’s home to approximately eight thousand people. It’s a small community where most everyone knows one another. There’s nothing but strip malls and second-tier grocery chains you never see elsewhere. If you click on the “Attractions” tab on TripAdvisor’s Monroe page, it brings up a message that says, “I’m sorry, you must have clicked here by mistake. No one could possibly be planning a trip to Monroe to see its ‘Attractions.’ I have a feeling about why you’d want to go to Monroe. Here, let me redirect you to a suicide-prevention site.

But let’s all realize we are in the same boat dealing with the same shit. So if you aren’t into someone, before just ignoring them, try to be mindful of how frustrating it is to be on the other side of that and maybe try crafting them an honest message or, at the least, lie and say: “Hey, sorry, working on my debut rap album, Fantabulous, so gonna be in the studio nonstop and need to focus, not dating at the moment. I’m very flattered though and you are a great person, all the best.

When asked about the survey, Buenos Aires's mayor, Mauricio Macri, dismissed it as inaccurate and proceeded to explain why women couldn't possibly have a problem with being shouted at by strangers. "All women like to be told compliments," he said. "Those who say they're offended are lying. Even though you'll say something rude, like 'What a cute ass you have'...it's all good. There is nothing more beautiful than the beauty of women, right? It's almost the reason that men breathe." To be clear, this is the mayor. Upon reading this quote, I investigated, and can confirm that at the time of this interview he was not wearing one of those helmets that holds beers and has straws that go into your mouth.

On another note, I also learned that everyone plays games with texting, like waiting longer than the other person to text, sending replies of equal length, always trying to get the last word, and the like. Even if you say you “don’t play games,” that is a type of game—it is the “I don’t play games” game. Everyone hates these games and no one wants to play them. For the most part, people just want to be honest and say how they feel, and they definitely want others to be honest and open with them. But here’s the thing: Unfortunately those games are actually kind of effective. No matter how much people want things to be different, I don’t think we can defeat the insecurities and tendencies built into our internal psychology.

I was doing stand-up in a small club in New York. I was talking about texting and I asked for a volunteer who’d met someone recently and had been texting back and forth with them. I read the back-and-forth messages of one gentleman and made jokes about how we were all dealing with some version of this nonsense. I quickly noticed that one woman seemed very puzzled. I asked her why she looked so bewildered, and she explained that this was something that just didn’t happen in France, where she was from. This kind of back-and-forth simply didn’t exist, she claimed. I asked her, “Okay, well, what would a guy in France text you, if you met him at a bar?” She said, “He would write . . . ‘Fancy a fuck?’” And I said, “Whoa. What would you write back?” She said, “I would write yes or no depending on whether I fancied one or not.” I was stunned—that kind of makes so much more sense, right?

Asking someone out on a date is a simple task that frequently becomes a terrifying conundrum of fear, self-doubt, and anxiety. It’s full of tough decisions: How do I ask? In person? Phone call? Text? What do I say? Could this person be the person I end up spending the rest of my life with? What if this is the only person for me? What if I fuck it all up with the wrong message? Though technology has added a few new, modern quirks to this dilemma, asking a new person to go on a romantic outing has never been easy. It means declaring your attraction to someone and putting yourself out there in a huge way, while risking the brutal possibility of rejection—or, in the modern era, even an unexplained, icy-cold silence.

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.

This change in communication may have some side effects, though. In her book Alone Together, MIT social psychologist Sherry Turkle convincingly makes the case that younger people are so used to text-based communications, where they have time to gather their thoughts and precisely plan what they are going to say, that they are losing their ability to have spontaneous conversation. She argues that the muscles in our brain that help us with spontaneous conversation are getting less exercise in the text-filled world, so our skills are declining. When we did the large focus group where we split the room by generation—kids on the left, parents on the right—a strange thing happened. Before the show started, we noticed that the parents’ side of the room was full of chatter. People were talking to one another and asking how they had ended up at the event and getting to know people. On the kids’ side, everyone was buried in their phones and not talking to anyone around them. It made me wonder whether our ability and desire to interact with strangers is another muscle that risks atrophy in the smartphone world. You