Spurious. That’s the word I would use to describe The Normal Bar. First of all, bar is such a cold and unwelcoming metaphor. I hear it, and I don’t think love relationships. The “tools” at the end of each chapter are also utilitarian and kind of masculine to me. When they started discussing prongs, I was like, are we building a house or a love relationship? The metaphors were so technical. We’re talking about normality. Why not use a more accessible i.e. gender neutral i.e. normal metaphor? Perhaps because the book isn’t about normalcy. Despite it’s claims to diversity, it’s really exclusive. It’s American and European read white. The only time African Americans were addresses was to note they trust each other less and cheat more. Each chapter included at least one cartoon. Only three characters were colored in. What’s normal about a survey that focuses on pretty much everyone but people of color? Oh my bad, there was also a passing mention of Latinos and Asians. In addition to that a majority the tips in the tools required quite a bit of disposable income. I was like, I’d love to do that, oh wait, on my salary, I can’t afford to do that to make my relationship better. So much for normal.
Then the data was just suspect. 100,000 people is more than I’ve ever surveyed. Yes, I admit that, but a book full of claims about 30% of this population is not generalizable to the world’s population (since they claim to be so diverse). If we can’t talk about at least half, then why are we talking? I learned next to nothing reading this book. I would never recommend it as a relationship book because there are so many books written by real relationship researchers that could actually be helpful. And to add another pet peeve they ran fast and loose with the data. Why would you flip the stats for your pull quotes? It just shows how easily everything you conveyed could be manipulated. For example, they might write, 90% of people are happy then the pull quote would read 10% of people are unhappy. Just plain sloppy. I know what bugs me the most about this book. It’s an internet book. It’s a book filled with cartoons and pithy quotes and stats and data that make for a good blog and a terrible book.