Red flags to watch for before you take anyone’s relationship guidance
The dating advice industry is enormous. Books, podcasts, YouTube channels, TikTok creators, and Reddit threads—everyone has opinions about how to find love. Some of this advice is genuinely helpful. Much of it isn’t. After a decade spent researching dating advice from the 1800s to the present, I’ve identified three reliable warning signs that the guidance you’re consuming is more likely to hurt than help.
1. It promises techniques instead of growth
Bad dating advice focuses on what to do. Good dating advice focuses on who to become.
This is the fundamental problem with both pickup artist tactics and rules-based strategies like The Rules. Both approaches treat dating as a performance—a set of scripts and behaviors designed to trigger attraction. Negging. Playing hard to get. Waiting three days to text back. The artificial time constraint. These are techniques designed to simulate attractive qualities without actually possessing them.
The problem? They’re fakeable signals—and humans are remarkably good at detecting fakes over time. A man who memorizes confident body language but lacks genuine self-assurance will eventually be exposed. A woman who manufactures scarcity but has nothing else going on will eventually seem empty rather than intriguing.
Attraction operates through what biologists call “costly signals”—displays that are hard to fake because they require real underlying qualities. Genuine confidence is attractive because it signals actual competence. Real generosity is attractive because it signals actual resources. Authentic wit is attractive because it signals actual intelligence.
When advice promises shortcuts around this reality—“say these exact words” or “follow these specific rules”—it’s selling you a fantasy. Techniques might generate initial interest, but they can’t sustain it. If the advice you’re following doesn’t require you to actually improve as a person, be suspicious.
2. It treats the opposite sex as a monolith
“Men want X.” “Women are attracted to Y.” “All guys think Z.”
These sweeping generalizations are a hallmark of bad dating advice. Yes, research shows some average differences in what men and women tend to prioritize in partners. But the variation within each sex dwarfs the variation between them. Treating half the population as a uniform category with identical desires is not just inaccurate—it’s a recipe for misreading the specific person in front of you.
The best dating advice acknowledges context. What attracts someone looking for a casual fling differs from what attracts someone seeking a life partner. What signals status in one subculture may signal nothing—or the wrong thing—in another. What works with an extrovert may backfire with an introvert.
When advice speaks in absolutes about what “men” or “women” want, it’s usually revealing more about the advisor’s limited experience than about human nature. The person you’re trying to connect with is an individual, not a representative of their demographic category.
Advice that helps you understand and respond to individuals will serve you better than advice that treats dating like a game with fixed rules for each player type.
3. It tells you what you want to hear
The self-esteem movement revolutionized dating advice starting in the 1980s, and not entirely for the better. A new generation of books and experts began telling readers that they were already perfect, already deserving of love, and that finding a partner was simply a matter of believing in themselves hard enough.
This feels good. It’s also often useless.
The uncomfortable truth is that if you’re consistently failing to attract the partners you want, something probably needs to change. Maybe it’s your approach. Maybe it’s your presentation. Maybe it’s your social skills, your lifestyle, or your expectations. Good advice helps you identify what that something is and gives you a realistic path to improvement.
Bad advice tells you the problem is everyone else. Bad advice says you just need more confidence, more self-love, more affirmations. Bad advice treats any suggestion that you might need to change as an attack on your worth as a person.
There’s a difference between healthy self-acceptance and delusional self-satisfaction. The former acknowledges your inherent value while remaining open to growth. The latter uses “self-love” as an excuse to avoid the hard work of becoming someone others actually want to be with.
If the advice you’re consuming never challenges you, never makes you uncomfortable, never suggests that you might need to develop new skills or change old habits—it’s probably not advice at all. It’s just flattery dressed up as guidance.
What good advice looks like
Good dating advice does three things:
First, it focuses on genuine development rather than performed behaviors. It asks what qualities make someone attractive and helps you actually cultivate those qualities—not simulate them.
Second, it acknowledges complexity. It recognizes that different people want different things, that context matters enormously, and that rigid rules are less useful than flexible principles.
Third, it tells you what you need to hear, not just what feels good. It balances encouragement with honesty, supporting your self-worth while still pushing you to grow.
Finding advice that meets all three criteria isn’t easy. But it’s worth the search. The wrong guidance can waste years of your life chasing strategies that don’t work. The right guidance can transform not just your dating life but your broader development as a person.
Choose your advisors carefully.
Andrew King is the author of Costly Signals: The Evolution of Dating Advice. His research archive spans over 500 dating and relationship books from the 1800s to the present.
Dating and Mating 
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