Since the advent of Cosmo, dating advice for heterosexual women is seemingly everwhere. It’s in rom coms, and Sex and the City. It’s on Reddi, it’s on those Are we Dating the Same Guy Facebook groups, it’s somehow in every other TikTok post (which please…..I am here for fun historical content, book recommendations, and consumerism). There are a million different philosophies being peddled constantly. Focusing on “high value” men (sprinkle sprinkle), embodying your divine feminine (I missed the day of school we got that), playing hard to get, if he wanted to he would, here’s why even if he wanted to he might not. We live in a world where I can search up my dating conundrum with the word “reddit” after it and find a post about a woman my age who had this *exact* situation three years ago and dozens of strangers weighing in on how she should handle it. It’s incessant, exhausting, and confusing. Amidst all of this noise, it becomes impossible to hear your own thoughts anymore.
And therein lies the issue.
The ubiquitousness of dating advice has rendered many women completely incapable of trusting their own judgment. We are constantly at the mercy of what some imaginary other smarter, savvier, wiser woman would do.
Except that woman isn’t *us*, we’re so fixated on making the right choice or the cool choice that we forget that we need to make the authentic choice. All of these advice hawkers are ultimately speaking from their own experience and worldview which may not align with yours. Following their advice can result in us pushing our own needs and feelings aside.
Of course, I’m not discounting a good old fashioned debrief with the girls over a cocktail or two. Or well informed guidance from a therapist. But the vast majority of dating advice floating around on the internet is from women just like you and me.
It’s not that their advice is misguided, though it can be (don’t even get me started on the whole divine feminine thing). But the sheer quantity of the advice, and the fact that new dating gurus seem to be coming out of the woodwork all the time, make us feel like we can’t even make decisions on our own. We need them to be validated not just by our close friends, but by some random 22 year old from Chicago that recently broke up with her finance boyfriend and is in her “feral girl” era.
As I mentioned earlier, this advice is naturally going to be colored by the advisor’s worldview, meaning that is often overwhelmingly white, cis-het, and thin. Queer people, BIPOC, and people who move through the world in larger bodies experience many aspects of dating in a fundamentally different way. Dating advice from someone who occupies a more privileged position can be at best unhelpful or at worst, harmful.
The most common theme I see is that the advice being peddled by mostly white, thin, cishet early-mid twentysomething women is that it is overwhelmingly heteronormative. Not only is this advice often unimaginative in the way that men and women relate to each other, but often actively seek to uphold gender role rigidity. I know that even liberal and leftist men can still demand gender role conformity, explicitly or implicitly, in their romantic relationships. And maybe it’s idealistic or asking too much, but I do think that *good* dating advice should seek to challenge those norms at least a little bit.
I know this advice comes from a good place. Dating can be awful and terrifying and it’s natural to want to lend a hand to your fellow woman. But the best dating advice, at least in my opinion is, don’t take any of it.
Diary of a mad brown girl 
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