most dating advice is written by people who hate themselves for other people who hate themselves
Conversation
it's impossible to give blanket dating advice because the causal network is so large and complicated that everyone's going to have different nodes that are available as leverage points for actual change
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blaming dating problems on large abstract nodes like "society" or "modern alienation" or w/e can feel satisfying but since none of those are easily available leverage points they will not actually help you date
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here is one possible very simplified version of the causal network which consists only of plausible leverage points that i happen to be particularly into:
self-hatred ➡️
emotional suppression ➡️
carefully crafted masks that break under stress
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most dating advice is about improving your mask. this is a fundamentally brittle and inflexible strategy, directly antithetical to the sense of play and creativity that the best romantic experiences are made of, because there is not shared awareness that the mask is just a mask
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"be yourself" as dating advice is about dropping the mask. but if you don't know how to unsuppress your emotions this is useless advice. no mask + emotional suppression is just blankness, numbness, paralysis, freeze
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"feel your feelings" as dating advice (less common but found e.g. in models by mark manson) is about undoing emotional suppression. but if you hate yourself this will be very difficult in multiple ways. a lot of what might come up will feel unbearable
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self-hatred generates a lot of feelings about your feelings that will contribute to emotional suppression, mostly different flavors of shame: i shouldn't feel this way, feeling this way makes me a loser, a freak, an idiot, a degenerate, a crazy person
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uhhhhh
"okay but it's empirically the case that many kinds of emotions and behaviors will get you rejected and ostracized"
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