Most Dating Advice Is Nonsense
Why 90% of what you’ve heard won’t help—and what really will.
By Dr. Axel Schumacher
“I’ve tried everything,” people whisper into their phones at 2 a.m., staring bleakly into the blue light of despair, scrolling through yet another recycled meme promising soulmate-level enlightenment if they just “raise their vibration” or stop texting back too fast. “Why am I still alone?” they ask, as if the algorithm might offer an answer, perhaps nestled between a cat video and an ad for weighted blankets.
The short and unfortunate truth is this: most dating advice isn’t just daft—it’s certifiably bonkers. As the splendidly cynical science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon once said, “90 percent of everything is crap.” And bless him for his optimism. In the world of dating advice, it’s closer to 95% if you count YouTube thumbnails with shirtless men yelling at you.
The Us-Versus-Them Trap
Take a casual stroll through any dating blog, YouTube channel, or influencer reel, and you’ll find a landscape of feuding ideologies that makes the Cold War look like a polite misunderstanding. It’s “alpha males” versus “feminazis,” “high-value men” versus “bitter spinsters,” “gatekeepers” versus “victims,” as if dating were some kind of tribal skirmish fought with hashtags and protein shakes.
The whole mess is less about finding love and more about building loyal armies of perpetually single followers—because nothing sells like simmering rage and unresolved intimacy issues—rage always does—but it also ensures you die alone with only your Wi-Fi and your unresolved childhood trauma. Real romance, if memory serves, involves things like laughing at dumb jokes, navigating awkward silences, and maybe—just maybe—being kind to each other. It’s about mutual curiosity, not social warfare.
Both men and women face impossible double binds:
- Women must be sexy, but not too sexy; independent, but not intimidating; nurturing, but also crushing it at work; and always, always be “chill” about it.
- Men are told to make the first move—then punished for it. They must earn six figures by 30, look like a Marvel superhero, be sensitive but never soft, and somehow not cry even as their dating app match ghosts them mid-sentence.
No wonder so many end up demoralized. Yet most coaches recycle one-size-fits-all scripts: “Be more confident,” “Use this pick-up line,” or “Change your wardrobe.” They ignore the deeper pressures shaping modern romance and the thrill of heartfelt adventure. The deeper forces shaping dating—status anxiety, evolutionary pressure, cultural myths—go ignored, while the snake oil keeps selling.
The Illusion of Expertise
Who writes these guides? Often, it’s:
- Lab-bound researchers—brilliant in theory yet clueless about awkward first dates. They may understand oxytocin receptors but panic when someone makes eye contact at Starbucks.
- One-hit-wonder pickup artists—someone’s one-off “night-out breakthrough” marketed as universal truth. Those guys whose “dating script” was likely more tequila than technique.
- Therapists without fieldwork—skilled at empathy but often removed from the wild terrain of dating apps, ghosting, and awkward brunches.
In dating advice, a single lucky night can qualify you to pen The Definitive Guide to Getting Laid. Imagine a physics student publishing The Definitive Guide to Rocketry because he once made a paper plane that hit a teacher. That’s where we are. And... please, for the love of all things sane, do not get me started on The Secret and the so-called “Law of Attraction.” That’s not wisdom—it’s wishful thinking in a prom dress. Sit on your couch, wish real hard, and the universe becomes your butler? Please. If thoughts alone shaped reality, the planet would be paved with Ferraris and ex-lovers begging to come back.
My own audit—hundreds of books, thousands of videos, 100+ of seminars from dating, inner work, attachment styles to tantra, tens of thousands of scientific papers, working and learning with some of the best coaches and seducers on the planet, studying over 100 dating coaches—revealed a clear pattern: 90 percent of dating advice is crap, 7 percent is “meh,” and a mere 3 percent holds real value.
Adding to the confusion, social-psychology has suffered a replication crisis: many celebrated studies on attraction and flirting fail under rigorous retesting. If half the science underpinning your coach’s mantra can’t survive basic scrutiny, why trust it? Some advice is technically correct but utterly impotent:
“Be more charismatic.”
“Show authentic vulnerability.”
“Improve your body language.”
This is like advising a drowning person to “swim better.” Charisma demands targeted routines; vulnerability requires emotional-safety scaffolding; body-language mastery needs precise feedback. Without granular “how-to,” such tips amount to motivational fluff. Without clear frameworks, these tips are just poetic lint.
A Smarter Way Forward
If educated guessing fails, what succeeds is first-principles thinking: breaking dating into core forces—biology, psychology, social scripts—and recombining them with the experience of the world’s top dating experts.
I’ve studied monks and matchmakers, scientists and seducers. I’ve distilled lessons from classic romantics and modern seducers alike: coaches who’ve taught kings’ sons and CEOs, matchmakers who’ve united royalty, and lovers who’ve walked the globe in pursuit of connection. Their field-tested tactics—grounded in evolutionary psychology, game theory, and real-world experiments—provide a roadmap, not a rote script. The real strategies? They’re empirical. They’re teachable. They’re human. And they don’t involve negging.
Dating is not a checklist but an odyssey—a quest for beauty, awe, and unexpected sparks. Real romance unfolds when you rediscover your capacity for wonder and invite another to share it. Science and experience can guide your path, but the thrill of stolen glances under moonlight and laughter over midnight coffee still belongs to you.
Some fear evidence-based advice shackles spontaneity. In truth, it frees you from repetitive blind spots—those invisible pitfalls you’ve stumbled into hundreds of times. Like Odysseus resisting the sirens, you use clear frameworks to avoid the rocks and savor the uncharted waters where serendipity thrives.
A New Hope for Connection
“But won’t all this science kill the magic?” Only if your idea of magic is repeating the same mistake 17 times in a row. This isn’t about robotic matchmaking or sterile spreadsheets. It’s about empowering human judgment with precise insights—so chemistry, not chance, becomes your ally. The goal? Not just a quick hook-up, but a resilient bond that weathers time and adversity.
By uniting decades of global fieldwork, rigorous science, and the wisdom of history’s greatest romantics, we can finally slay the dragon of bad advice and guide every sincere seeker toward genuine connection. Because the scarcest resource isn’t time or money—it’s truly knowing how to love and be loved. That’s not nonsense. That’s art. That’s science. And yes, that’s worth staying up until 2 a.m. for.