Online Dating Blog

Over at SingleCityGuy.com, there’s a discussion of how women give their female friends awful advice regarding men. I’m not sure that this is a universal problem but I have seen exactly what he’s talking about. I’ve been absolutely flabbergasted by some suggestions women have made when debating dating situations regarding men. The problem, as the article points out, is that women are over-thinking how much thought we’re putting into our decisions.

A recent movie, He’s Just Not That Into You shows this type of advice in the wild. The movie, which is based on a book of the same name, makes a point that a woman shouldn’t try to conjure up some story to make a man’s actions understandable just to make that decision what the woman was hoping for. One thing that the movie emphasizes repeatedly is that these women who want to believe something unbelievable are only encouraged by the advice from their female friends. In many cases while watching the movie, it seemed to me that many of the women giving advice would rather lie or fuel false thinking than see their friend feel rejection. However, I think that’s the point of the movie and the SingleCityGuy article: none of these women think they are lying!

As a man, my friends have always been up-front about relationships when I’ve requested advice. I can’t even count the number of times a friend said something like “Forget her, man. There’s plenty of better women out there”. Did it hurt having a friend point out that I was being rejected? Sure. Was it good advice? Absolutely.

I do know women who have realized that guys think about things differently…and that knowledge dramatically improves the advice they give. It’s obviously possible for women to give good dating advice about men (CyberDatingExpert comes to mind). However, when a woman approaches providing advice from the angle of “men think like women” (which seems to be the default), the advice is going to be shoddy. To be fair, it’s not just the every-day-woman who makes this mistake. Even major publications for women give some pretty crazy advice (relationship quizzes, anyone?) when it comes to guys…and you would think they might ask a man or two if what they’re printing makes any sense at all.

I will say that women giving men advice about other women is very valuable. I can’t thank enough the women who helped me when I was dating online. I also admit that men give plenty of bad advice about women. It’s my opinion, though, that men are much quicker to admit that women think far differently than we do (the confused looks on our faces reveals this quite often). This admission is pretty important when it comes to giving good advice.