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We Talked to Aziz Ansari About Why Smartphone Dating Sucks

A comedy book that features far more charts and graphs than you'd expect.
Image: Modern Romance

We're all living two lives. We've got whatever's going on in the physical world, and then we've got our online personas—our Facebook and Twitter profiles, our Gchat lives, our Reddit accounts, our OKCupid and Tinder profiles. How do you make sense of it all? And how are we supposed to find love when everyone lives in two separate worlds?

Comedian Aziz Ansari calls our smartphones the "world's largest singles bar," and he's not wrong. At any moment, we can text whoever we want, check out of reality, or swipe through Tinder. The internet is connecting us to new people, but it's getting harder to make a lasting connection with someone when another option is simply a swipe away.

This week, we talk about how technology has affected our dating lives, talk to Aziz about his new book, Modern Romance, and talk to his coauthor, sociologist Eric Klinenberg, about how to make sense of this new world we've found ourselves in.

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