I Didn't Know I Needed This: The New Rules for Flirting, Feeling, and Finding Yourself

by Eli Rallo

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

The modern dating landscape is vast, frustrating and oftentimes confusing, but this book hilariously unravels its mysteries by giving you the tools to master your intrepid love life.

**A Publisher's Weekly Bestseller**

From TikTok star Eli Rallo, an irreverent, laugh-out-loud funny, and searingly honest take on modern dating and romance with tips, tricks, and survival-guide style rules.

I Didn’t Know I Needed This is the dose of confidence every girl needs to live their life on their own terms. Eli Rallo is a social media superstar, a Carrie Bradshaw for the TikTok age, a true romantic at heart, and the best friend every young woman wishes she had. As someone who prides herself in feeling fully and deeply, Eli is on the ride with you, kissing the frogs, sending (and deleting) the risky DMs, climbing down frat house gutters, making the friends you’ll have for life, all while finding love and falling in love with yourself and learning that everything will be alright. In this earnest and vulnerable look at what it’s really like to date as a young woman in the modern world of dating apps, rotating rosters, and social media snafus, Eli gives her rules for each stage of the game—tried and true tricks of the trade.

I Didn't Know I Needed This follows the natural lifecycle of dating, starting with being single, flirting, and navigating the apps to going on dates, having sex, falling in love, and managing relationships, to finally dealing with heartbreak, finding closure, prioritizing your friends, and honoring your life. Discover the rules that have worked for her, and garnered her more than a half million TikTok followers:

• prep for a first date like an athlete before a big game
• try a person out in different settings before committing to them
• plan the second date while you’re out on the first
• find your perfect “eff me sweater”
• flirt with your partner, no matter how long you’ve been together
• give yourself a set mourning period to wallow after a breakup, and then stick to it
• always (always!) communicate your needs, wants, desires, and boundaries
• find little ways to love your life and treat yourself

With touching stories of her own adventures and mishaps, Eli helps you navigate dating in a way that’s frank, honest, funny, and relatable, giving the advice that you didn’t even know you needed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063298460
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	12/12/2023
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	30,652
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Eli Rallo is the author of I Didn’t Know I Needed This and an internet creator with massive followings on TikTok and Instagram. She is the founder of Prose Hoes Literary Salon, the previous host of the Miss Congeniality podcast, and a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance. When she isn’t writing or TikTok-ing, you can find her at piano bars in the Village belting out show tunes.

Editorial Reviews

10/16/2023

TikTokker Rallo debuts with a witty guide to modern dating that bills itself as less “Dear Abby” and more “like your audacious older sister sitting on your bed with a handle of tequila and a box of tissues and a bottle of lube” and dispensing candid “if you like him, just tell him” advice. Mining her own dating history, from a painful on-and-off college relationship with a man who told her, “via a Google Doc, that I was the best sex he ever had,” to the “Bumble boyfriend” who “proved I could love again,” Rallo breaks down each stage of dating. She recalls “get to know who I was as though I were a stranger” after moving to New York City for grad school and counsels readers to “treat yourself right first.... The rest of it will all fall into place.” Elsewhere, she reviews a string of breakups and recommends spending enough time processing heartbreak and remembering “you can get to the other side, because all around the world, every single day, people do.” Despite a somewhat slippery structure—numerous romantic trials bleed into one another, along with bits of motivation and the occasional dating rule (“The most attractive thing you can be is confident. GO THRIVE”)—Rallo’s assured voice and solid counsel carries this through. Those able to see the humor in heartache will be gratified. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

Eli Rallo’s debut is not to be missed. Her writing is fresh, funny, and honest. I Didn’t Know I Needed this will be a bible to those navigating the sticky, confusing, and often accidentally hilarious world of modern dating." — Tara Schuster, author of Glow in the F*cking Dark and Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies

“Funny, charming, and real, I Didn't Know I Needed This is the book every young woman definitely needs. Like a wise, compassionate, and highly entertaining big sister, Eli takes lessons she learned the hard (and often hilarious) way about navigating modern relationships and gaining self-worth, cutting through the confusion, and saying: You are more than enough, and it will all be okay." — Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk To Someone and co-host of the Dear Therapists podcast

From the Publisher

Funny, charming, and real, I Didn’t Know I Needed This is the book every young woman definitely needs. Like a wise, compassionate, and highly entertaining big sister, Eli takes lessons she learned the hard (and often hilarious) way about navigating modern relationships and gaining self-worth, cutting through the confusion, and saying: You are more than enough, and it will all be okay.”

New York Times bestselling author Lori Gottlieb

Eli Rallo’s debut is not to be missed. Her writing is fresh, funny, and honest. I Didn’t Know I Needed This will be a bible to those navigating the sticky, confusing, and often accidentally hilarious world of modern dating.”

author of Glow in the F*cking Dark Tara Schuster