Released September 2008 (HarperCollins) * 224 pages * ISBN: 9780061456503
Dating Makes You Want to Die (But You Have To Do It Anyway) is a fun read. It is sarcastic and yet there is truth in the sarcasm. There are fun little quizzes, silly scenarios, and she says/he says banter. I like that the chapters progress through the various stages of a relationship (and send you back to the previous chapter if you didn’t graduate).
Although I’m not dating, my partner and I had a laugh as I read some of the book aloud and we reminisced about our first date (The Kinda Date). You know the Kinda Date, the one where you’re not sure that you’re actually on a date because the other person is hedging their bets and not declaring it a date? Yeah, those are fun.
I did find that the brash humour got a bit much in large doses, but that won’t bother everyone. Here’s a passage about breaking up so you can get a feel for the type of humour:
The good thing about being cathartically vengeful is that it gets tiresome. After week three of screaming into his voice mail, you’ll get tired. You just need to exorcise the hurt of being dumped. Once that clears through the pure force of your abject bitchiness, you can go back to being antagonistic to your Chinese deliveryman for not including your egg roll order again. (p. 165, ARC)
This book is very American in its humour and popular culture references, which is worth noting if you are buying it outside of the US. I don’t have cable so I don’t get a lot of American TV and some references escaped me completely, while others were well-known enough that I could supply the Canadian equivalents myself (I mention this because I got this book through a Canadian publisher–if I had received it from an American publisher I would make allowances for that).
This is not your typical self-help book which is both its strength and its weakness. After reading a lot of self-help books on many different topics, this humorous and irreverent approach is certainly refreshing. I did find that there was a certain superficiality to the information, which is almost a requirement with the humour approach.
If you are just starting to explore why you aren’t having success in dating, then this book is a gentle and easy introduction to the issues. If you already know you have issues with dating, then this book addresses the issue on too superficial a level to be helpful. However, if you know someone who complains about their lack of success at dating, but they don’t seem to know where to begin to fix the issue then this may be the right book. It is definitely a good book to give someone who is in denial about their dating prowess (you can pass it off as a gag gift if they get offended).
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