Nothing Personal
My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A raw and funny memoir about sex, dating, and relationships in the digital age, intertwined with a brilliant investigation into the challenges to love and intimacy wrought by dating apps, by firebrand New York Times–bestselling author Nancy Jo Sales
At forty-nine, famed Vanity Fair writer Nancy Jo Sales was nursing a broken heart and wondering, “How did I wind up alone?” On the advice of a young friend, she downloaded Tinder, then a brand-new dating app. What followed was a raucous ride through the world of online dating. Sales, an award-winning journalist and single mom, became a leading critic of the online dating industry, reporting and writing articles and making her directorial debut with the HBO documentary Swiped: Hooking Up in the Digital Age. Meanwhile, she was dating a series of younger men, eventually falling in love with a man less than half her age.
Nothing Personal is Sales’s memoir of coming-of-middle-age in the midst of a new dating revolution. She is unsparingly honest about her own experience of addiction to dating apps and hilarious in her musings about dick pics, sexting, dating FOMO, and more. Does Big Dating really want us to find love, she asks, or just keep on using its apps?
Fiercely feminist, Nothing Personal investigates how Big Dating has overwhelmed the landscape of dating, cynically profiting off its users’ deepest needs and desires. Looking back through the history of modern courtship and her own relationships, Sales examines how sexism has always been a factor for women in dating, and asks what the future of courtship will bring, if left to the designs of Silicon Valley’s tech giants—especially in a time of social distancing and a global pandemic, when the rules of romance are once again changing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sales (American Girls) gets plenty personal in this candid and provocative memoir investigating Big Tech's disruptions of dating. She argues that dating apps—rife with harassment, powered by algorithms that reinforce racial bias, and designed to be addictive by data-mining companies—are undermining real connection. Yet, approaching age 50 and reeling from recent heartbreak, she's hardly immune to these "problematic little cattle prods of desire" and embarks on a series of often terrible hookups with 20 some-odd men, including one guy who takes a call from his mom mid-coitus and another who insists that "all girls like being choked." She eventually finds hot, intimate sex with Abel, but ghosting is a frequent feature of their on-and-off "situationship," and an act of casual objectification becomes the final straw. Supporting her own experiences with statistics and quotes from researchers, tech execs, and fellow daters, Sales touches on everything from "incels" (members of online "involuntary celibate" communities) to sex robots; the linkages can occasionally strain, as in an analogy between a narrowing of dating experiences and the loss of biodiversity. But Sales's funny, fresh approach will resonate with many single readers, as well as anyone concerned about the ways technology enables capitalism to invade personal lives.
Customer Reviews
Must read for understanding modern dating
Nancy’s work with teens and social media always digs deep, but to me this book is much more than that.. a first person account of the trials and tribulations of dating in the modern age, funny, raw and honest. A great read, eye-opening