Most Relationship Advice Is Useless
You will not learn about love from YouTube Shorts
I think 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.
First, the incentives are all wrong. Influencers compete for our attention, which means escalating what they say, becoming more extreme to get an edge. Dramatic thumbnails, catastrophic titles, everything gets quicker and louder to compete. This goes for TikToks and Reels and Shorts most of all, where advice comes without context, has to hook us immediately, gets compressed into a blast of entertainment. Every relationship rule becomes universal; every personality trait a red flag; every difference a dealbreaker. Give this any attention and you will only get more: another TikTok autoplays, another influencer invited in, all these answers to questions you never asked.
Second, those talking obsessively about relationships online tend to be the most bitter and hurt, posting to make sense of their pain. The most common advice given on Reddit is break up; the least common is compromise. Post your problem and complete strangers will search your relationship for red flags and warning signs, helpfully concluding that it is beyond repair. I see the same impulse with catchy TikTok advice: it’s so rarely how to stick together or how not to take people for granted, but almost always never settle, never be satisfied, never accept the bare minimum. Which sure, is important sometimes. But also seems convenient for clicks, to keep us anxious and second-guessing, wondering if what we have is enough.
Then there’s a problem I’ve been trying to get at for a while now, which is that more awareness is not always the answer. We are so wary it’s impossible to feel anything. You can’t be vulnerable if you’re this vigilant. It’s so paranoid, relationship advice today, always starts by assuming someone’s out to take advantage of us. We think it’s making us safer and stronger, better armed against hurt and heartbreak, bookmarking 6 SIGNS HE IS CHEATING and listening to The TRUTH about love NOBODY tells you but I’m not sure it is, it just creates anxiety and paranoia, creates nervous and neurotic wrecks. The problem with dating today is definitely not that we don’t know enough. Being hyperaware of almost anything you’re doing makes you worse at it, like trying too hard to fall asleep. Sometimes it almost seems like a trick, to make us think we are educating and enlightening ourselves when really we are wasting time, getting worse at the thing, forgetting how to do it naturally, and then we need even more advice. Hypochondriacs, all of us: just as obsessing over your health can make things worse, obsessing over relationships can do the same. Knowing all these studies and patterns and statistics can stunt you, make you too serious, make love harder, not easier.
I mean, where are the outcomes, the results? I know about love-bombing and fearful-avoidant attachment styles and have all these checklists for high-value people yet don’t feel I’m any happier, can’t say I’m any better at loving. Are we a more patient, generous, forgiving generation for it, in the end? All I see is a whole load of people so articulate in clinical advice but totally illiterate about love and commitment. And I always wonder where this would all take me, if I took it seriously. If I followed these rules perfectly, what would I be? This ugly, inhumane thing, I think, judging and disapproving, paranoid and vigilant, throwing people out the moment they don’t measure up. I think this about the onslaught of health advice, about productivity and self-optimisation hacks too: I do not believe if I did it all right I’d be more loving and successful and healthy, I’d just be something other than human.
The saddest part is that this is often the only advice young people have. Sometimes people laugh when I take crazy TikToks seriously but, well, that’s where most teens are, where they live and learn, on social media platforms, as much as seven hours a day. Twelve year-olds are scrolling through the inner worlds of wounded adults, reading their rants and ruminations before they’ve even held a boy’s hand. And I try to get this across to parents: porn is not the only problem online, neither are predators; children are also being overwhelmed by the opinions of strangers. We are leaving them swimming through stereotypes and generalisations adults stewed up in their own heartbreak, learning about love from the rules and assumptions of the most neurotic. And the sheer volume of it, it’s gone from advice columns in girly magazines and mums crouching beside beds to talk about boys to this, to TikTok algorithms delivering the thoughts of divorcees to thirteen-year-olds. How confusing, feeling the weight of that at this age. Maybe that’s why young women are pessimistic, why teenage girls don’t dream of getting married so much anymore, in part because they grew up here, taught by the traumatised, hanging onto every word of the brokenhearted.
But they need advice, need direction. I feel for them, it’s so natural. But God we have to intervene, to insist that this generation is getting it first and foremost from real people in their lives, from family, from friends, from those who care about them. Of course some might only have strangers to turn to, but that’s not all that’s happening here; this is where a lot of young people are going first for advice because they don’t want to bother those they know and love, don’t think it’s their place. And this, I would argue, is our central affliction in modern life: we choose the substitute over the real thing. Ask for advice, of course. But ask friends before forums, ask someone who knows who you are and what you want, ask people whose only incentive is your dignity and wellbeing. And if you want to know what works, look at relationships around you, look at the real world and its consequences, look at who is happy and how they got there, look at who is unhappy and the mistakes they made, at the very least do not allow strangers online to get in the way of what you can see. Do not scrutinise or sacrifice your relationship on the altar of someone else’s virality. Do not let them clamber into your home, into your head, so they can get off on your attention.
Because the truth is you will not learn about love from YouTube Shorts or TikTok experts or Reddit threads, and I seriously doubt the answers are one more self-improvement podcast away. You will only learn about love in the presence of real people, in late night conversations talking until your eyes turn red, in getting things wrong and trying to put them right again, in your beating chest when you bet your life on someone else, in the joy and rejection and hope and sting that comes from trying and from living. You will learn about heartbreak from the wounded eyes of your mother and the shaking shoulders of a friend, from the broken and brilliant lives you see all around you. That’s life, and that’s where advice lives, where it comes from, chiselled out of regrets and mistakes, chiselled out of the pain of people you know and love. The rest is useless.
If you appreciated this post, I have a whole chapter on modern dating and relationships in my new book, GIRLS®: Gen Z and the Commodification of Everything, which is out now in the UK! You can order a copy here:
UK:
Amazon / Waterstones / All retailers
US:
The "your partner is secretly cheating" genre of shorts plays on paranoia. It's a similar dynamic with political polarization. Take the worst possible idea -- fascism, Nazism, cannibalism, pedophilia -- and drop vague evidence or suggestions. The personal equivalent is to insinuate to a mass audience, "is your partner secretly cheating? planning to leave you? gaslighting you? a narcissist?" These accusations pull people in like a car crash. It's hard to resist catastrophism. It's a compelling story, even if it's detached from reality.
This kind of thinking is sometimes correct, but much of the time it's self-defeating, and a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe your partner is conspiring against you, that will make you withdraw love, subconsciously, to protect yourself. But as you withdraw, they withdraw too, and this "confirms your suspicions," until the spiral ends in disaster.
And what's the lesson? Do people take that as evidence that they were too paranoid? Nope -- you were too trusting, didn't see the signs, didn't protect yourself *enough*. Safetyism confirms its own suspicions, doubles down, and this ends in loneliness and alienation. Too fearful to try again.
This is the most fearful generation -- less sex, less alcohol, less parties, but more weed because it's "safe."
i found myself wanting to stand and applaud you for this. last year, my marriage entered the darkest period of it’s roughest years-my very depressed, struggling husband, left us for 5 months. i started that period and some months before frantically reading and watching every marriage advice i could get my hands on, and what happened? i became more unhappy, convinced my husband was struggling AT me and doing it on purpose. it made my life so much worse. it stopped me from loving a man i had committed 20 years to already, and turned me into a judgmental woman. more awareness IS a problem, i wholeheartedly agree. he is back home now, we are healing, and guess what? the second i stopped watching those videos and reading those articles and we stopped going to marriage counseling (dont get me started), we were both able to be present and love each other. and i for one am *much* happier just trying to be good in this present moment rather than make myself “better” all the time.