Free Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari, Eric Klinenberg

information we can so easily obtain online often causes him to be too harsh on people. “I’ll go through and look at their entire timeline of tweets. I’ll see one dumb thing I don’t agree with, and then I kind of mentally check out on the date,” he said.
    It may be harsh to judge someone’s personality off a tweet or two, but if you’re serious about your research, the Internet offers a whole lot more information than that. When we posed the question of first-date Internet research to the subreddit, we heard some serious horror stories.
    One woman recounted canceling a date after a brief bit of research:
    I googled my date who had a very distinctive name. According to a weekly synagogue newsletter, he and his wife were hosting a Torah class for children in their home the same day as our date.
    This has also been recorded as the only time in history someone has said, “Whew, I’m glad I read that weekly synagogue newsletter.”
    Other stories were even more horrific.
    One woman wrote:
    [A] friend from work met a firefighter in a bar a few months ago. They talked a lot that night/exchanged numbers and were texting back and forth for the next week while setting up a first date. He told her he didn’t have a facebook and when she mentioned that to some other people, they told her she should be concerned that he might be lying and actually have a girlfriend or be married. So she google searched his name + LA fire department and found that there was a news story on him (with a video!) about how he AND HIS MOTHER beat up an elderly woman who was feeding stray cats on their street. She immediately stopped talking to him.
    This is why I always say: If your mother asks you to come beat up an elderly woman on the street for feeding stray cats—JUST SAY NO. It’ll always come back to haunt you.
    WHAT WE DO WHEN WE AREN’T INTERESTED
    If you are just plain not interested in someone, you have a whole other conundrum to deal with. How should you let this person know you aren’t interested? From our interviews, it seems there are three big approaches: pretend to be busy, say nothing, or be honest.
    In every stop on my tour, from San Francisco to London to Wichita, I asked audiences which method they used. In total, this was more than 150,000 people, and in every audience, a sample size of a few thousand, the response was always the same. Overwhelmingly, most people practice the “pretend to be busy” and “silence” methods. Only a small sliver of the crowd would say they were honest.
    However, when I flipped the situation and said, “Okay, now pretend the situation is reversed. Someone else is dealing with
you
. How do you prefer
they
handle the situation? Clap if you prefer
they
pretend to be busy.”
    A smattering of claps.
    “Clap if you prefer they say nothing, that they give you silence.”
    A smaller smattering.
    “And finally, clap if you prefer that they are honest with you.”
    Basically, the whole audience would applaud.
    Why do we all say we prefer honesty but rarely give that courtesy to others? Maybe in our hearts we all want to give others honesty, but in practice it’s just too damn hard. Honesty is confrontational. Crafting the “honest” message takes a lot of time and thought. And no matter how delicately you do it, it feels cold and mean to reject someone. It’s just easier on many levels to say nothing or pretend to be busy until people get the picture.
    Do we really prefer to get the cold, hard truth when someone is rejecting us, though? We don’t respond well to rejection, especially when we’ve put ourselves out there and shown interest in another person, and it’s painful to read a message saying that someone doesn’t want to date you.
    If we’re honest with ourselves, we realize that, however bizarre, we actually prefer to be lied to. If someone lies and says they are dating someone or they are moving to another town soon, you don’t feel rejected, because it’s no longer