Modern Romance (17 page)

If I went out with a girl, and the date felt like it was a six, normally I wouldn’t have gone on a second date. Instead, I would have been on my phone texting other options, trying to find that elusive first date that would be a nine or a ten. With this new mentality, I would go on a second date. What I found is that a first date that was a six was usually an eight on the second date. I knew the person better and we kept building a good rapport together. I discovered things about them that weren’t initially apparent. We’d develop more inside jokes and just generally get along better, because we were familiar.

Just casually dating many people had rarely led to this kind of discovery. In the past I had probably been eliminating folks who could have possibly provided fruitful relationships, short- or long-term, if I’d just given them more of a chance. Unlike my enlightened friend in Monroe, I just hadn’t had enough faith in people.

Now I felt much better. Instead of trying to date so many different people and getting stressed out with texting games and the like, I was really getting to know a few people and having a better time for it.

After doing the research for this book and spending time reading papers with long-ass titles like “Couples’ Shared Participation in Novel and Arousing Activities and Experienced Relationship Quality,” I realized the results of my personal experiment were quite predictable.

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.

In a fascinating study published in the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
, University of Texas psychologists Paul Eastwick and Lucy Hunt show that in most dating contexts, a person’s “mate value” matters less than their “unique value.”
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The authors explain that they define “mate value” as the average first impression of how attractive someone is, based largely on things like looks, charisma, and professional success, and “unique value” as the extent to which someone rates a specific person above or below that average first impression. For instance, they explain the unique value of a man they call Neil like this: “Even if Neil is a 6 on average, certain women may vary in their impressions of him. Amanda fails to be charmed by his obscure literary references and thinks he is a 3. Yet Eileen thinks he is a 9; she finds his allusions captivating.” In most cases, people’s unique traits and values are difficult to recognize, let alone appreciate, in an initial encounter. There are just too many things going through our minds to fully take in what makes that other person special and interesting. People’s deeper and more distinctive traits emerge gradually through shared experiences and intimate encounters, the kinds we sometimes have when we give relationships a chance to develop but not when we serially first date.

No wonder that, as Eastwick and Hunt report, “Most people do not initiate romantic relationships immediately after forming first impressions of each other” but instead do it gradually, when an unexpected or perhaps long-awaited spark transforms a friendship or acquaintance into something sexual and serious. According to one recent study, only 6 percent of adolescents in romantic relationships say that they got together soon after meeting.
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The number is surely much higher among adults, especially now that online dating is so prevalent, but even people who meet through Tinder or OkCupid are much more likely to turn a random first date into a meaningful relationship if they follow the advice of our Monroe friend Jimmy: 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.

W
hen I decided to write this book, one of the things I really wanted to explore was how the different issues in modern romance manifested themselves in other countries. 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?

Internationally, there’s a huge variety of dating cultures that have their own quirks and dilemmas. Our interviews in Doha were interesting and made me excited about the possibilities of researching dating in other cultures. Obviously, we couldn’t study all of them, so Eric and I had to be very selective about where we went. After a lot of debate, the places we landed on were Paris, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires.

The reason for Paris is obvious. It’s the city of love, blah, blah, blah. Also, relationships in Paris are similar to what we’d read about in other European countries, where dating as we know it in America is not really part of the culture. People hang out in groups of friends, and if they want to start a relationship with someone, they just do it. They are also a bit more casual about sex and have a different attitude toward infidelity, as we will see in the next chapter.

Tokyo was the next place I suggested. This was done less in the interest of the book and more in the interest of me enjoying some delicious ramen. However, after discussing the idea with Eric, we realized Tokyo was a great place to go because Japan is going through a crisis of sorts. Marriage and birthrates are in a huge decline, many young people are showing a lack of interest in romance, and also, again, I love ramen. It was clear Tokyo was a great choice, both for the book—and our tummies.
*

While Japan is experiencing a decline in sexual interest, we also wanted to see the other extreme, so we went to explore the romantically aggressive culture of Buenos Aires. There’s a good reason that Buenos Aires is often called the world’s best city for dating.
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PDA is rampant. People are dancing in sweaty clubs until eight or nine in the morning. Sex is everywhere you look.

So there’s our itinerary. While we couldn’t go everywhere, these places all provided a uniquely interesting take on modern romance around the world. Okay, let’s go. First stop, Tokyo!

TOKYO:

THE LAND OF HERBIVORES AND TENGAS

My initial thought was that Tokyo
would have a highly active dating scene.
It is a booming metropolis, throbbing with life and energy, arguably even more so than New York. You have everything—the tastiest restaurants, the coolest stores, and the weirdest stuff that you can’t find anywhere else in the world. An entire video arcade filled with nothing but photo booths? Yep. A vending machine that grows and sells fresh heads of lettuce? Yep. A restaurant with a dinner show where bikini-clad dancers ride in on huge robots and tanks? What else do you think goes down at the Robot Restaurant in Shinjuku?

THE ROBOT RESTAURANT IN TOKYO. SERIOUSLY.
This is a real place. What the hell is happening in this picture? It appears that three Asian women are dancing on three giant Asian women
robots
. Too meta? Those people in the photo sure do seem entertained.

Plus, I’d heard rumors of “love hotels”—which are what they sound like: hotels specifically built for hooking up. But, of course, this being Japan, they sometimes have really amazing decor—there’s even a
Jurassic Park
–themed one. Seriously, this exists. I am not joking.

NOTE:
There were no photos available online so this is an artist rendition commissioned by me for the book. I hope the rooms are this cool and you get picked up from the airport in a tricked-out JP Ford Explorer from the nineties.

At night the neon signs turn the city into an adult adventure land: The streets, bars, and clubs are raucous and busy. Something fun and interesting is lurking in every nook and cranny. You can wander onto the third floor of an office building and find an amazing high-end cocktail bar behind one door, a record store behind another, and past the hallway a bizarre nightclub filled with Japanese men wearing Bill Clinton masks giving back rubs to dogs.

Walk through many of the big neighborhoods often enough, and you are bound to stumble upon a little hidden corner with sex stores and the aforementioned love hotels—which are actually nice, clean hotels that rent by the hour and are used by couples to pop in and do their thing. Upon first glance, the city closest to Tokyo in terms of dating infrastructure would seem to be New York.

I also assumed the tech-obsessed Japanese were probably on the next level of dating websites and apps. 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.
*
Who knew what their texting back-and-forth would look like? I couldn’t wait to do our interviews and see what kind of stuff was going on.

It all seemed ideal for the perfect dating city, but I could not have been more off. All my assumptions were wrong. Start doing even the slightest research into Japan and love, and you’ll quickly find sensational articles describing a full-blown crisis. According to demographers, journalists, and even the Japanese government, it’s a hot potato.

Sorry, I needed another word for “crisis,” and when 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.”

“Hey, did you hear about what’s happening with Israel and Palestine? It’s becoming a real hot potato.”

Anyway, back to Japan. You read these articles and they are just filled with panicky language: “No one’s fucking!” “No one’s getting married and having kids!” “Young people aren’t interested in boning anymore!!”

Those aren’t direct quotes, but that’s pretty much what you read.

It sounded alarmist to me. Young people are just
not interested
in sex?! How could that be possible? Let’s bust out some scary-ass statistics.

•
In 2013 a whopping 45 percent of women aged sixteen to twenty-four “were not interested in or despised sexual contact,” and more than a quarter of men felt the same way.
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I’ve always wanted to describe a statistic as “whopping,” and I think we can concur, this is indeed whopping. Seriously, read those numbers one more time.
Despised
sexual contact.

•
The number of men and women between eighteen and thirty-four who are not involved in any romantic relationship with the opposite sex has risen since 1987, from 49 percent to 61 percent for men and from 39 percent to 49 percent for women.
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•
A whopping one third of Japanese people under thirty have never dated,
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and in a survey of those between thirty-five and thirty-nine, more than a quarter reported that they’d never had sex.
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(Okay, that was the last “whopping” I’ll use.)

•
Almost half of Japanese men and one third of women in their early thirties were still single as of 2005.
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•
In 2012, 41.3 percent of married couples had not had sex in the past month, the highest percentage since the figures became available in 2004. There was a steady rise over the previous ten years, from 31.9 percent in 2004.
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•
Japan’s birthrate ranks 222nd out of 224 countries.
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A report compiled with the government’s cooperation two years ago warned that by 2060 the number of Japanese will have fallen from 127 million to about 87 million, of whom almost 40 percent will be sixty-five or older.
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This last stat is particularly alarming. The Japanese are legitimately worried about running out of Japanese people. No more ramen?? No more sushi?? No more high-end Japanese whiskeys??! You see how this is really a hot potato.

The situation has reached a point where even the government has seen the need to step in. Since 2010 the Japanese state has paid parents a monthly allowance of between $100 and $150 per child, to take some of the financial burden out of child raising. But before you can have a kid, you need to find someone to love and marry, right? Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe allocated $25 million in the 2014 fiscal budget for programs designed to get people to pair off and have babies, including government-funded dating services. An official survey conducted in 2010 showed that 66 percent of all prefecture governments and 33 percent of city/ward/town/village governments were implementing some form of marriage support. Even more do so today.
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We asked the Japanese American sociologist Kumiko Endo, who studies the new “marriage support” programs that the Japanese government has established, to give us some examples. In Niigata Prefecture, she said, “marriage support events include tours (e.g., bus tour to nearby shrine), cultural events (e.g., cooking classes), sports events, and seminars (coaching sessions for men while fishing).” Saga Prefecture has set up a Department of Connection that fixes up singles who want to meet new people, and both Shizuoka and Akita prefectures now provide Internet communication services for singles, whom they inform about various parties and events for singles, some of which are supported by the government. Finally, Fukui Prefecture recently launched an online dating site called the Fukui Marriage-Hunting Café, and couples who meet on the site and marry receive cash and gifts.

The government is sending Japanese couples wedding presents? What on earth is happening there?

Learning about this crisis—and remembering how much I was fiending for authentic ramen and all the other delights of Tokyo—it was clear I needed to hit the ground myself to find out what was happening.

Contemplating the sexual crisis in Japan while wearing a kimono in Kyoto . . .

THE HISTORY AND CURRENT STATE OF MARRIAGE IN TOKYO

Before getting into the current situation in Japan, it’s important to understand that Japan has also seen a large shift in how adults view and pursue the institution of marriage.
My sociologist friend Kumiko explained to me that up until World War II, arranged marriages were more common than any other form of matrimony. Even in the 1960s approximately 70 percent of all marriages were set up by families. In the 1970s the workplace became a prime site for finding a mate. Large companies would organize social gatherings, and cultural norms dictated that most women would quit their posts after they married and started a family.
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