Five Dating Tips You Won’t Hear From Red-Pillers
Modern social media, perhaps especially Elon Musk’s Twitter, is full of the worst dating advice I have ever seen: truly epic stuff such as “Don’t pay for dinner dates,” “Women hate affection,” and “You have no responsibility to sexually satisfy your partner.” Much of this God-awful advice dribbles out of the so-called “red-pill” and incel movements and specifically targets men. One popular line of counsel urges males, “in the wake of feminism” not to behave like gentlemen — ever. For example, the popular hoe-scaring Whatever podcast recently dropped a viral tweet arguing that “paying for dates, chivalry, etc., is reserved” for serious girlfriends. Until just a few steps before the engagement ring, women should expect “No courtship!” (exclamation mark theirs)
Whatever’s comments were littered with bros (admittedly my own collegiate tribe), pretty much agreeing. One user, Rob C., opined: “I’m going to keep this nice and sweet. These women of 2025 are not the women of past generations. Modern times call for modern solutions.” Did he agree with a recommendation like “no paid dating?” “100%!” Another fellow by the handle CSFurious had a cut-off for door-opening and the like: “Definitely don’t pay for dates with [any] chick who is already developing a stomach [...] and who has been banged a lot.” He offered an alternative to the nice evening out for women in that fallen category: “Maybe […] pay her straight up to bang, and then you can smack her on the arse when you tell her to leave! Lol.” Another reply guy, Wasif Iftesam, considered the other Rhett Butlers in the comments too kind. Quoth he: “[Dating] is reserved for wife ONLY!”
The worst imaginable dating advice dispensed to untold millions by men whose only contact with a vagina occurred during birth. What could go wrong?
But the men of social media aren’t struggling alone. Advice from women, to women, is often equally asinine. A list of 28 places to which apparently normal young female respondents said they would not go on a first date recently went megaviral, and included everything from “The Cheesecake Factory” and “The Olive Garden” to “the movies” to “anywhere that requires a long drive.” Staggeringly banal relationship tips, like dating coach Gia Macool’s “When not fighting, married women should fuck their husbands,” are often greeted with post-feminist roars of: “I am not a SLAVE!”
Then there’s “age-gap” dating discourse, driven almost entirely by women, which seems to be approaching some odd kind of singularity. Another recent viral debate centered on whether it is “abusive” for a 26-year-old man to pursue and date a healthy 23-year-old woman. The plurality position in most comment threads seems to be “yes.”
Facing this bone-dry (in all senses) youth dating scene, it seems almost my duty — as a happily committed 40ish columnist for a sex-positive magazine — to contribute an essay’s worth of actual dating and romance tips. So, here goes: in order of controversiality, from least to most.
1. Don’t take dating advice from incels or red-pillers.
A few months before all of this, one of the many wayward gentlemen of Twitter, “Yugi Zag”, got almost 80,000 views for his advice to men on what to do if you do happen to pay for a nice meal, but this does not result in a same-day agreement to have sex or hook up. In that case, he contends: “Excuse yourself, call another woman, and tell [your date] she has to leave — you’re expecting a female friend.” An even more recent and viral tweet along these same lines: “The last time I checked my fuck diary” since giving up sexless dates “my number was 254.”
Commenting on this sort of thing, one female user summed up the online male right thusly: “Redpill men: ‘I want a trad wife!’ Also redpill men: ‘I won’t pay for her dinner on dates, I don’t hold the door, I expect a prenup, she has to prove she’s worth the risk of marriage, I won’t wait until marriage for sex, I’m not religious, etc. Why don’t women want me?!!” As the kiddos say, no lies detected.
Even the relatively few good-game post-fraternity-scene male accounts out there peddle a fair amount of dross along with the pearls. The more-than-occasionally funny Fort Worth Playboy, whom I myself follow, offers a list of long-term dating tips which — in addition to some gemstones — includes 1981 Yugo-level lemons such as “Indifference is your best friend” and the exhortation to “never” change anything “for a woman.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Playboy markets a dating course titled “Chicks Dig Jerks.” His page also includes a series of posts that were clearly shared as comedy, but which appear to have been taken seriously by at least some young gunners. Among these are sparkling nuggets like “Bitches love being compared to porn stars,” “Date models, they don’t eat,” and “Get rabidly drunk once a quarter, to keep the wife on her toes.”
2. You should like your partner, and love them if possible.
This seems obvious, but sadly really does need to be said by an “unc” in response to the increasingly prevalent lite-hooking vibe of today’s OnlyFans, “fuckin’ then I get some money,” “too good for Olive Garden” era. Resources are a bonus in relationships, but it’s difficult to imagine anything more genuinely depressing than sucking off a person you actually dislike — and swallowing — because they bought you a plate of lamb fries and three $7 blue margaritas.
3. You can date whoever the hell you want — across all age and racial lines — given that they are a consenting adult.
Seriously, offline and outside of Generation Z, almost literally no one cares. The 50-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio’s latest girlfriend is around 25: they look happy as hell. Good for them!
It’s also worth briefly noting here that many arguments made against age-gap dating are pseudo-scientific gibberish. For example, it may be true in the most-technical sense that the prefrontal cortex of the human brain is not fully developed until age 25 (on average), but by 18, a large majority of brain development is done, as evidenced by the fact that we let 18-year-olds drive, work, live alone, join the military, get married, and vote. More importantly, brain decline begins, at least for males, in the early to mid-40s. Rather obviously, one cannot possibly only be considered a “consenting adult” for the brief and glorious window between ages 26 and 39. As a grown-ass person, you can have adult fun with other grown-ass people.
4. Adult expectations exist and must be met in order to maintain any happy relationship.
Being asked to sexually satisfy a partner, whatever their sex, and whether you’re straight, bi, or gay, is not “abuse.” A truly terrible idea shared across both the Andrew Tate manosphere and the more bizarre later waves of feminism is that working to please your partner sexually, financially, and in other normal ways is a form of submissive slavery. As relationship gurus ranging quite literally from Dr. Ruth and Camile Paglia to James Dobson and Dr. Laura Schlessinger have noted in the past, however, nothing could be further from the truth, given the second rule above: that you like and love your, well, lover.
With that caveat in place, it should be obvious to any thinking person that adult relationships rest on a bedrock of mutual expectations and norms. While no one should ever be forced against their will to do something they truly do not wish to do, sex and romance (“intimacy”) are, at some level, the thing that separates relationships from very close friendships. The denial of “normal sexual relations” was grounds for divorce across almost every society ever to exist — very much including the United States. And, beyond the bedroom, it has long been clear that few people would opt to share the rest of their house with someone unwilling to contribute by paying bills, doing chores and upkeep, or splitting both of those duties with their partner.
The point here is simple: “Don’t be useless, and ride for your partner” remains as true today as it has ever been. Thankfully, it has apparently not yet been totally forgotten. I was recently pleased to see that among my elder-Millennial social media audience, 93% of women and a surprising 98% of men said that in healthy relationships, they felt a duty to keep their spouse or Special Person “emotionally, sexually, socially, and financially satisfied.” We might quibble a bit about the terminology used here, but the takeaway is: do you give the back rub or warm up the meal — or whatever — if you are tired but fully willing to do so? Yes! For any young folks who are currently seeking the same level of stability for themselves, it’s worth keeping this in mind.
An important follow-up to this point is that what grown-ups are talking about here is not direct one-for-one transactionality: “I pay the electric bill, so you blow me! Ugh!” Ugh, indeed: that’s exactly what I mocked in the “margaritas” example above. At some level, we all know usefulness and reciprocity are mandatory in functional relationships: few people reading this would date a serious physical abuser, or a crackhead, or even a person who paid for nothing at all while expecting to be treated like a king. Of course, it gets more than a bit assholeish to mention this fact on anything like a regular basis — and smart people don’t.
A better way to approach serious romantic relationships is what my fellow eggheads call a consistent long-game: a situation in which you expect to be “trading” enjoyable favors with the same friendly person for a long time. In this context, your most logical approach is to try to make your partner as happy as possible — with honesty and food and head and conversation and belly rubs — with the expectation that they will do the same for you. As long as both of you do this, you will both very consistently be happy. If it stops on one end, the two of you need to have a brutally frank conversation — and then go back to doing it. This is science, kids!
5. Many modern, educated couples might want to recall that “gender roles” exist for a reason.
Perhaps the defining point of separation between human beings is that (only) women have the babies that continue the human species. Carrying these fascinating little creatures inside a body takes nine months. Recovering from the vag-to-ass, unnerves-every-fighting-man-to-see-it splitting of birth takes another three to six. And many, if not most women, find that on the other end they are far better at childcare than their larger, more aggressive, verbally dumber husbands.
In the very significant majority of historical societies, including quite “feminist” ones like the Iroquois, couples resolved this issue by sending males out to do the majority of the hunting and aggressive trading while women ran the home front. Not only was this arrangement not invented by “sexist white men” in the recent past, it wasn’t even invented by humans: we see similar role divisions among monkeys and even among wolves on a more temporary basis. While working this out comes down to each couple, the ancient breakdown of “labor” hardly makes less sense under modern capitalism, when paying a nanny to come in, watch one child well, and clean the house costs about as much as a typical office email job pays.
Most things in life are fairly simple. Like or love your partner. Go hard for them emotionally, sexually, and domestically. Discard hipster, incel, far-right, or radfem philosophies that tell you not to do this. If we’re being frank, warn and then dump partners who won’t do the same good things for you.
But, if all is good, live happily ever after.
Published May 7, 2025
