Danger! Dating Advice to Avoid

From your buddies to your mom to your best female friend, everyone and their dog thinks they have excellent dating advice for you. And some people actually do. But perhaps more important than getting quality advice is identifying lousy advice—and rejecting it before you get slapped, dumped, or worse. No matter how cleverly phrased, the following ideas can only lead you down a dark path. If you want your love life to be more George Clooney, less Kris Humphries, turn a deaf ear.

“Catch Her Off Guard”

No. Don’t. She doesn’t want a challenge. Not yet. She wants pursuit. It’s true that “Do you come here often?” makes for a really crap-tastic pickup line. What’s not true is that you need some kind of exotic icebreaker to get her interested.

Just ask something that engages her, like what she thinks the beer from that goose-shaped tap tastes like or whether the bartender’s handlebar mustache is ironic or sincere. The harder you try to be “witty” or “edgy,” the more you’ll just come off as weird or a douche.

“Give Her a Neg”

In pickup artist parlance, “negging” is using a backhanded compliment to put yourself on a higher plane than a woman so that she feels she has to win your approval. It’s probably the worst advice you’ll ever get from a pickup artist, and that’s a pretty high bar to begin with.

Telling some girl her nails are a mess or she’s wearing too much makeup isn’t an excellent way to get her to like you. The only ladies who fall for this move are the ones you don’t want to get mixed up with in the first place.

“Women Are Emotional”

It’s not that women aren’t emotional. Everyone is emotional to some degree. However, banking on her lack of common sense while dating is not only sort of piggish, it’s also not going to get you any closer to being intimate with her.

Much like negging, playing on a woman’s irrational side is fine if you’re looking for a night of wild sex with a psycho chick who’ll torch your car when things go south. If you’re looking for something a little more stable/less frightening, you’ve got to honestly pursue both her heart and her mind.

“Keep Her Distant”

Do you want her to respond to your rugged, mysterious self? Get real. This is another way to guarantee that the only women you date are nuts and want you to be their abusive father. If you have some sort of fetish for waking up next to a dead bunny with all your possessions on the street, by all means, don’t share anything about yourself with her. You’ll be self-selecting for crazy with one of the best methods out there.

Any Dating Advice A Woman Gives You

Listen, it’s not that women are dumb, incompetent, inept, or anything. Many of them can offer you great advice on several subjects. You can even ask them for feedback on stuff that’s going on with a more long-term partner.

However, getting dating advice from women has three decidedly significant drawbacks:

A. Most of the women who aren’t your mother are girls you’ve dated, girls you’ve slept with, or girls you have some sort of unresolved sexual or romantic tension with. In other words, they are not strictly impartial.

B. All girls are not the same, but most girls tend to think that all women think like they do.

C. Women (like everyone else) are great at explaining what they think they want and absolutely terrible at pinpointing exactly what they respond to. Don’t believe me? Ask the girl who only dates jerks what she wants in a man, and you’ll likely hear some mumbo-jumbo about compliments and flowers. Case closed.