The best books about relationships and dating in the modern age

Emira meets Kelley when he’s a bystander holding up his phone to capture evidence of a security guard harassing Emira in a supermarket. Relationship introductions don’t get much more modern. Kelley promises that he’s emailed Emira the only copy and deleted the footage but, as events unfold, she questions his honesty. The digital era is a defining aspect of this novel; Instagram is used to curate nights in bars for a wider audience, there are trust issues around digital content and who can access it (e.g. an employer who monitors Emira’s phone when it’s lying around), plus text message mannerisms and what they signify as two people get to know each other. Everything about this book is very ‘right now,’ which I enjoyed.  

As a reader who doesn’t care much for plot, this novel is a dream. Its 420 pages range from Harvard to Paris to Hungary following Selin, a Turkish-American linguistics student, in her first year at college. She’s super clever but her limited engagement with the subtleties that turn the social world results in many moments of deadpan laugh-aloud reflection. It’s 1995, email is brand new, and it’s the main medium by which she and fellow student Ivan conduct their relationship—but is it a relationship or is it waiting to develop into one? Is he hiding behind email or romancing her with long digital letters? Anyone who loves language will relish their communications which interweave English, Turkish, Hungarian, and Russian references.

In this immersive memoir, Kassabova observes that people who’re drawn to the difficult dance of tango are usually complex and thin-skinned and thus, when relationships form between tango partners and, inevitably, end the suffering is excruciating because… complex and thin-skinned. Steeped in the history of tango and its music, the contemporary element comes from the Kassabova’s freelance life; accepting travel writing assignments at short notice, stepping off a plane into another city’s tango scene. Her relationship with dancing evolves over a decade and several continents, similarly her connections with tango aficionados encountered around the globe. There’s more than one heartbreak, described in lucid, compelling prose but the end is heart-healing because, as an Ecuadorian friend tells her, "The universal woman makes her own way."

There’s no logical reason why the two main characters can’t be together, yet they’re in a push-me-pull-you dance until the last page—one of the best-selling dances of recent times. Marianne and Connell meet at high school, but the cracks in their home lives and the pressures of adolescence have led to a mutual sense of internalised shame that threatens to rupture their connection, from school to university and beyond. It’s hard to be a bystander to their intimacy, observing the way low self-worth is affecting their behaviour, but Rooney’s capacity for natural dialogue and capturing the discomfort of people becoming vulnerable is unrivalled. It’s a startlingly skilled portrayal of what deep, intense love does when it finds two wounded people too young.

Many excellent story collections would fit on this list but with Treats you’re squarely in contemporary territory; arranging a date via the internet and then returning home to open the laptop again when the date wasn’t successful. Or finding a boyfriend online, only to discover his strange fetish for penguin costumes. Or realising that your girlfriend is checking out of the relationship when she refuses to pose for a selfie. There are twenty-plus stories, some just a few pages long, but the details are rich enough to evoke a whole life. There’s a unifying milieu where realism meets absurdism, preventing the dysfunction from feeling too desperate, and I appreciated the author’s inclusion of knowing one-liners, to great comic effect.