Proof positive that real life doesn’t wrap stories up with neat bows. If this was a 90s-era romcom, author Aimée Lutkin’s search for love by deciding she’s going to go on two dates every week (using dating apps) would culminate in a swooning moment, finding each other in Times Square, or running through an airport in a wedding dress. In this memoir such a conceit/gimmick is a pretty good hook, it just doesn’t add up to much.
The first problem is that as a character in her own story, Lutkin doesn’t seem to know what she wants. She never overtly admits to being miserable because she’s been single for six years, casting herself as a canny feminist millennial who’s lucky to occupy a world where a woman doesn’t need a man to get ahead or complete her. So why the social experiment around dating constantly at all?
Even when she does fall for a guy about halfway through, he becomes an unhealthy presence, ghosting her.
She pines after the guy while maintaining her dating schedule and even moves across the country for him, finally having to admit she’s chasing an illusion.
Then, just when you think some perfect man is going to rescue her – or at least she’s going to come to some dramatic realisation about how she wants to live her life – COVID hits.
This is undoubtedly one of dozens of non-fiction books commissioned before the world went into a global lockdown that precluded social practices like dating, but in the end Lutkin has nothing to do but sit in her apartment, her journey cut short and with no real denouement to her story/experiment.
It’s far from a definitive document about millennial dating as touted, but she peppers her own experiences with scholarly research and scientific/psychological findings about dating, sex and relationships that are fairly interesting.
Reviewed by Drew Turney
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