7 pieces of terrible dating advice exposed

From your buddies to your mom to online masculinity coaches with skeletons in their closets, everyone thinks they have great dating advice for you. And some people actually do.

But perhaps more important than getting quality advice is identifying bad advice, and rejecting it before you get slapped — or worse. The following ideas, no matter how cleverly phrased, 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.

“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’re ever going to 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 a good way to get her to like you. The only ladies who fall for this move are the ones you don’t to want to get mixed up with in the first place.

“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 moustache is ironic or sincere. The harder you try to be “witty” or “edgy” the more you’re just going to come off as weird or a douche.

“Keep her distant”

You want her to respond to your rugged, mysterious self? Get real. This is yet another way to guarantee the only women you date are totally 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.

“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.

Anything a woman tells you

It’s not that women are dumb or incompetent or inept or anything like that. Many of them can offer you great advice on a number of 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:

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

“Lie”

Not if you ever want to see her again. I'm not saying you can’t exaggerate, fudge the truth, or even lay out a “creative” version of reality. After all, women pretty much expect us to do that. Outright bullcrap, though, is another matter entirely. While it might (might) get a girl back to your place for the night, you’d better never see her again. There’s no way you’re going to remember that whole original drunken spiel the second time around. She probably will, though. You know how chicks are.

If she calls you out as a liar, congrats; you’ve just created a wiener block for life. And women gossip. This could lead to an out of control wiener block chain reaction.

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