Online Relationship Advice Is Useless

You will not learn about love from YouTube Shorts

Online relationship advice is making us worse at love. It’s making it harder to date, more difficult to stay together, training us to be unforgiving and inhumane.

There’s just so much of it now. 5 SIGNS your partner is SECRETLY toxic. NEVER say THIS in a relationship. ALWAYS REMEMBER this rule. THIS is the RED FLAG you’re missing. Why you are WASTING TIME with the WRONG PERSON. Everything is so confusing and contradictory: never ask a guy where your relationship is going; ask immediately or you’re doomed. Never move in before marriage; you must move in before marriage. If your boyfriend doesn’t do this, he doesn’t love you. If she does this, run immediately. Careful with moving too fast, careful with moving too slow, careful careful careful. You are reckless, crazy, done for, if you date someone with any differences, with any past, with any complexity, here’s why you are making a HUGE MISTAKE.

I think this is popular because people are desperate for rules, for guidance. We occupy our own moral universes now. There is no shared path, there are no rules to follow, but we need rules, desperately want direction, so we binge TikTok and YouTube podcasts and X threads to know what’s right, to conform somehow. It seemed as though this would make relationships easier, us all being free to choose what we want. But that’s not how humans work, so that’s not what happened. We need to know what’s normal. Without any sort of script, with all other authority undermined, there was one place left to go. Now we get our guidance from the market, from industries and influencers, from places where it is mostly useless.