Aziz Ansari recently joined Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show to discuss a very serious issue faced by our generation: the proper way to flirt through text. Okay, who are we kidding? The two comedians actually just took time to laugh at some embarrassing examples of really bad text flirting.
The segment was done to promote Ansari’s recently released book, Modern Romance, which hit bookshelves on June 16th. As you probably already guessed from the title, the book explores the very unique experience of dating in this day and age.
“I had been starting to do this stand-up about dating and realized that the current romantic landscape is way different,” Ansari told TIME. “All these very modern problems – like, sitting and deciding what to write in a text – that’s a very new conundrum.”
“I want to be clear: The book is not, “It’s crazy! We have phones now!” The changes are far beyond the technology,” Ansari said of his book. “And marriage, not that long ago, was an economic institution where two families would come together to bring their wealth together. The whole idea of finding a soul mate only became a thing in the past 100 years. So the whole redefinition of what marriage is – nobody’s really written this comprehensive book about this kind of thing. I think it’s really funny and very interesting.”
According to Ansari, he and his team looked through the phones of actual people in search of their most face-palm “first textual experiences.”
“It was really surprising,” Ansari laughed. “The kind of bozo texts a lot of dudes send [because] it seems like a very simple thing to just say ‘Hey, would you like to do this specific thing at this specific time?’ but most dudes are just writing very weird things.”
Fallon decided to reach out to his own viewers and asked them to send in their most embarrassing first text interactions. They may not have secured a second date, but they certainly gave us a good laugh.
Feature image courtesy of Today.
