Dating today can be incredibly frustrating and carries with it a new-ish set of challenges with the explosion of digital platforms.  But in the end, there is one key to making the whole process optimal for everyone.

“Treat potential partners like actual people, not bubbles on a screen.”

That’s from the conclusion of Aziz Ansari’s “Modern Romance.”  The book, which he worked on with sociologist Eric Klinenberg, runs through how dating has changed over the years, especially with how people meet and how late in life they get married.  A lot of it involves how the process now runs through our phones.

For example, the authors cite a 1932 study of 5,000 marriage licenses filed in Philadelphia that found one-third of the couples had lived within a five block radius.  That is part of a group of studies and stories about how a lot of people met spouses who lived in the same apartment building or same street.

Obviously online dating has vastly expanded our options, even if that means coming across the profile of someone who does live in the same street but you might otherwise never run into out in the world.

But with these new options also comes new digital-age problems.  Ansari and his team conducted a bunch of focus groups in various cities and asked men and women about what it’s like to date now.  The groups touched on a number of topics such as the seemingly simple question of whether you should text someone or call them.  Ansari writes that in one group, a woman described calls as “The WORST” while another insisted that was the only way she would talk to a guy.

“[Dumbfounded] – Every guy in that focus group.”

Another major question is how long you should correspond with someone before meeting up for the first time.

“Laurie Davis, author of Love at First Click and an online dating consultant, advises her clients to exchange a maximum of six messages before meeting off-line.”

But, Ansari says, at the same time there are some people — mainly women — who say they become more and more comfortable about the idea of meeting someone in real life after getting more messages in which they seem likely to not be crazy or dangerous.

So what do you do with that?  I go for a happy medium.  You don’t want to waste your time endlessly writing back and forth with someone who may hate you in person, so I try to get to that date part sort of quickly.  But I’ve also heard so many horror stories from women I know about their online experiences.  Nothing has ever made me so glad to be a male, since all I have to deal with is odd situations and not ones that make me fearful or horrified.

Ansari presents what is almost a straightforward sociological kind of book, which is not exactly what I was expecting.  For anyone currently in the dating world, it’s a really interesting discussion that we don’t often have publicly about what works, what we like, and what ridiculousness we all seem to go through.

But between all the data and focus groups, he does manage to throw in a decent amount of the humor for which he’s famous.  He brings up how we break things off when we’re no longer interested and how hard it feels to basically say to someone, “Thanks…but no thanks.”

“This is why our culture developed lines like ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ and ‘I’m just not ready to be in a relationship now’ and ‘I’m sorry, I just want to focus on my dragon art,'” Ansari said.

I can’t wait until someone uses the dragon art line on me.  If you are in the position of potentially doing this, I hereby request that’s the method you go with.

There’s so much I could cover, but really if you’ve gotten this far and are interested I absolutely encourage you to read the book.  It’s not long and goes quickly!

But I will close with the amazingness that Ansari found in Japan, where the focus group yielded the fact that many people there do not use profile pictures featuring just themselves.  Instead, they are with groups of people, and often are just pictures of a cat or their rice cooker.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go change mine to something epic.