Modern Romance

Emerging adulthood is a new phenomenon in which young adults forgo marriage and children to go to college, try different careers, and date different people. The goal is to become “a more fully developed person” (17) before finding a stable partner, but some people remain in the emerging adulthood phase until well into their thirties. Emerging adulthood is a phase of life that many older generations never entered; for them, they moved straight from their parents’ house into their spouse’s house, never taking the time to be alone. This wasn’t their fault, however. Society’s expectations for young adults have changed. Older generations assumed that teenagers would quickly get married, while modern society expects young adults to go to college. 

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes the hedonic view of love as someone who thinks that the “best life would be the one with the most passion in it,” (222) and therefore, they would chase the feeling of passion from relationship to relationship. Hedonistic love is about fulfilling one’s own personal pleasure rather than building the stability and contentment that can come from a healthy long-term companionate relationship. 

The herbivore man is a Japanese cultural term used to “describe Japanese men who are very shy and passive and show no interest in sex and romantic relationships” (157). More than half of Japan’s young, single men consider themselves herbivores. This phenomenon is partly to blame for Japan’s decreasing population. The women who Ansari interviewed say they want men to take the initiative when it comes to dating, especially because women are considered “sleazy” if they approach the men first. Many factors have contributed to the rise of the herbivore man, but most notable is that many of these young men still live at home and are coddled by their mothers.

Mate poaching is when a person tries to “seduce a person out of a committed relationship” (204). More than half of men and women say that they’ve mate poached someone. While this idea is only briefly mentioned, it illustrates just one of the ways in which people are tempted to cheat.  

Monogamish is a term created by Dan Savage to “describe his open relationship with his partner” (228). Essentially, it’s the idea that two people can be committed to one another but still have sex with other people. Savage thinks that traditional monogamy is an impossible ideal, and by being monogamish, it allows two people to build the necessary parameters to explore their sexual desires outside of the relationship. 

The scarcity principle is the idea that people “see something as more desirable when it is less available” (64). Ansari relates this to the way people play games when it comes to responding to a potential lover’s text. Most people admit that they wait to respond because they don’t want to seem too eager or available. However, studies have shown that this is actually an effective technique to pique someone’s interest. 

Sexting is a combination of sex and texting, and it’s defined as “the sharing of explicit sexual images through digital media” (178). Sexting has become a way for modern relationships to build intimacy, especially when two people are living far apart. However, sexting has also been abused, with men sharing intimate sexts of their former girlfriends. Sexting has also become a way to cheat on a significant other because texts and social media messaging offer a private space that can remain hidden from others. 

Satisficers is a term “that combines ‘satisfy’ and ‘suffice,’” and it’s used to describe people who may dream about having the best but are content with “something that’s ‘good enough’” (128). On the other side of this idea is a maximizer, or a person who seeks out only the best and isn’t happy unless they achieve it. Ansari notes that people can be both a satisficer and a maximizer in different areas of their life. Online dating has made a lot of modern singles into maximizers because it gives the illusion that a perfect person is just a click away, and anything less than perfect is considered settling.