Whose Dating Advice Should You Listen To?

If married people's dating advice is out of touch, and single people's isn't trusted to work, who can you listen to?

While there are many losers and haters whining about my (frankly, tremendous) work, one criticism has been fairly valid which is that I shouldn’t give dating advice.

The reasoning is that because I got married ten years ago, and wasn’t single for a long time before that, I don’t know anything about the current state of dating. (I dated before my husband, but it was the 2000s and I was a teenager. If you’re curious, here’s a true story I wrote about a literal blind date I went on in 2004)

Much like the feedback I’ve gotten that I am too old to be dressing like Little Bo Peep or using saying things like this, it’s somewhat fair:

As a result of this feedback, I’ve had to stop myself from opining on a few things. For example, a while back I had one nuclear take about casual sex, which is that most of it isn’t that good physically (that’s not my best guess; it’s proven that women are way less likely to orgasm with a casual sex partner) and thus, the main reason people do it—women and men—is some degree of validation and enjoying the attention. It wasn’t meant to be judgmental, because I actually think enjoying attention is valid (do I really seem like someone who doesn’t enjoy attention?) It also wasn’t specifically about women, although women were the example I gave in the first tweet of the thread. But ultimately, I also postulated that the reason most incels don’t just hire a sex worker is because the validation of having a woman choose them for sex is more important than the physical pleasure of sex.

Anyway, I lived to regret this take for a few reasons, but the main one was that multiple people (at least ten, probably more) told me that I just wasn’t credentialed to say this. Admittedly I’ve never really had casual sex. Interestingly, the incel contingent largely agreed with me, but women didn’t. They told me they enjoyed casual sex even without orgasms. Other women told me that any critique of casual sex is slut-shaming, even if it wasn’t intended that way. They also pointed out that people aren’t having “casual sex” as often as I thought, and that I was framing it from the lens of high school or college behavior. And more women yet underscored because I’ve never had casual sex, my understanding of the topic comes from old Sex and the City episodes, Cosmo articles I read at the grocery checkout line as a teenager, and Twitter, which isn’t exactly the hub of the sex-havers.

While I don’t think all criticisms were warranted (some folks will complain no matter what you do), some made sense to me, and it altered the way I talk about sex and relationships. First of all, I don’t consider myself a “dating writer,” any more than I consider myself a “politics writer.” I write about social dynamics (see my three-part series on learning social skills in my late twenties) and it would be weird for me to talk about marriage, parenting, making friends, and exclude dating because I “haven’t done it.” (I have, it was just a while ago! I didn’t generate my husband on ChatGPT with the prompt “neurodivergent Greek guy in colorblock two-piece loungewear set obsessed with tile swatches and pillows.”) But even if I did write extensively about dating, I’d hardly be the first person with little experience in an area on which I fancied myself an expert. Never-married red pill guys write confidently about how marriage is a raw deal for men. Similarly, feminist writers who have no desire to be married themselves will write about how women in general have nothing to gain from marriage. People who have never had children will write about why “nobody is having children anymore,” or discuss the detrimental society-wide effects of the pandemic, screen time or social media on children. People who have never worked for a political campaign wrote articles opining on who Kamala Harris should pick as a VP, and they continue to make suggestions for how she should run her campaign. People have opinions on plenty of things they’ve never done, and for the most part, we tolerate it. We might even listen to them.

But dating is interesting because the people who have done it the most might not be the people you want to take advice from, either. If a married person, especially a person who got married young, is not qualified to write about dating, then why would a single person who is not yet married, or who was single for twenty years before getting married, be the authority on how to find a partner? For some reason, the very thing that makes dating “successful” (for most people, that’s finding a monogamous partner- I’m aware that’s not the goal for everyone, but speaking generally here) also happens to disqualify someone from giving advice. So for anyone looking for advice, they’re stuck in a spiral: do you listen to someone you can relate to, who hasn’t been successful, or do you listen to someone who was successful, but who you can’t relate to, because maybe they just got lucky?

Now, maybe there’s a middle ground. Perhaps the perfect person to give dating advice is someone who dated for a while, but got married at forty. But there could still be objections. If you’ve dated for a while, you ipso facto are older, and if you’re older, you can be accused of speaking to a different time, and not knowing anything about the “current” state of things. If you never used Hinge, for example, why should anyone dating in 2024 listen to you? Nobody cares about your whirlwind, old fashioned ass covered wagon pioneer lookin’ ass romance on OkCupid. But flipping that, why would anyone want to take dating advice from a twenty-one-year-old? You could just as easily say that person isn’t qualified to give advice because they don’t have enough experience. And if things have gone well for them, well, duh, they’re twenty-one and hot.

The “dating advice” world is, in many ways, suffering from the same dynamic that plagues any support group where graduating from the problem at hand makes you unqualified to discuss it (I’m aware not everyone considers being single to be a bad thing; however most single people who want “advice” are hoping to find a partner.) Anyway, a clear example of this dynamic would be incel forums.

While a lot of discussion on incel groups is about being lonely and sad, or being “so fucked” because of unreasonably narrow wrists (yes, I have seen the term “wristcel” used unironically) there are plenty of incel-adjacent forums where the main goal is to no longer be an incel. They want to get fit, learn social skills, and develop the confidence to talk to girls. But once someone has ascended from inceldom, nobody wants to hear from them anymore because they’re rubbing their success in everyone’s face. And moreover, if an incel finds a girlfriend, does that wipe his slate clean of the “incel” label entirely? Is there even such a thing as a “former incel,” or just a man who falsely believed himself to be an incel?