In a TikTok watched almost 140,000 times, Excel Rasanen recites to her followers a piece of dating advice: “When you put it out there, just let it be”. She compares it to a tennis match, saying that you don’t want to bombard your love interest with tennis balls; you should wait for them to hit the ball back first. According to the creator, “The reason why chasing is off-putting to men is that it seems like you lose value”.
In the video, Excel is summarising “Attraction Principle # 1” from Why Men Love Bitches by Sherry Argov. The dating self-help book, which was first published in 2002, reentered The Sunday Times’ best seller list in 2021 in large part thanks to TikTok. And it’s not the only over-a-decade-old dating ‘bible’ that has resurfaced on the app, with titles such as He’s Just Not That Into You, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, Men Are From Mars, Women are From Venus, and Calling In The One all being the subject of viral videos.
This might come as a surprise, given that these books are now widely considered to contain outdated and pseudoscientific advice. Typically, they’ll implore women to hold back on communicating their feelings too early on, to not be too clingy, or to stop ‘chasing’, in order to attract the opposite sex. Most will make reductive and often misogynistic claims, all while pretty much ignoring the existence of LGBTQ+ people. So why are these books resonating with new audiences?
Nichi Hodgson, author of The Curious History of Dating: From Jane Austen to Tinder, suspects that a longing for the pre-dating app era might have something to do with it. Research has shown that people are increasingly looking to find love in more ‘traditional’ ways, which many of these books – written prior to the dating app boom – focus on. Nostalgia for the time in which many of these books were written might also be fuelling their reemergence. As Nichi explains, while dating manuals have been around since the 1800s, they were mainly aimed at men, whereas the 90s and early noughties saw a flurry of dating advice books marketed at women.
“It was a time for women to really have their voice heard when it came to speaking about relationships,” she says. “There was a new cult of dating where women felt like they could say what they wanted about who they wanted, and they weren’t going to be judged for wanting somebody.” This was partly owed to third-wave feminism, and a feeling of renewed sexual liberation at the tail end of the AIDs crisis that emerged in the 80s. “In the 60s and 70s, people started to feel less inhibited about sex, in the 80s, people were afraid again,” says Nichi. “In the 90s, people were like ‘fuck this, we’re not going to worry about this anymore’.”
The resulting dating manuals, which were overwhelmingly marketed to an audience of women looking to take control of their dating lives, are now being repackaged for the digital age. For example, in a TikTok viewed almost 500,000 times, Rosalie Pell quotes an extract from Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus which reads, “a man’s biggest fear is that he is not good enough”. Rosalie says that the reason men “probably” ghost you is because “you’re too good for them, and they know that […] so they go for the girl who is easier, and settles for less”. For anyone who has been ghosted, this is understandably an appealing idea. But it points towards the tendency of these books to make sweeping generalisations about male and female behaviour, often in the name of ‘feminism’.
Viren Swami, a Professor of Social Psychology at Anglia Ruskin University, says that we ought to be sceptical of the idea that these books are a route to self-empowerment. “You can cloak yourself in feminism and the empowerment of women while still denigrating women,” he says. These books often present women as overly emotional and clingy, and suggest that finding love means essentially tricking men into thinking otherwise (see: Why Men Love Bitches) and becoming self-reliant. But as Viren points out, “We all want to be validated. We all want a circumstance that feels nurtured and feels cared for… that doesn’t make you inherently weak.”
It’s worth pointing out that this is true of most self-help books marketed at women, not just old-school dating manuals: “It’s pitched as men are perfect, whereas women, on the other hand, are deficient, they haven’t got a strong sense of self, they need to be trained to improve all those things,” says Viren. This individualises the problems people might encounter and ignores, for example, how patriarchal and racist structures will impact the dating landscape.
Viren believes that renewed interest in what he calls “rule-based” dating – the idea that if you follow a set of rules, you can find a match – is a response to the current climate. “Our societies are in flux in terms of how we understand gender relationships; how we understand who we should be attracted to; what a relationship looks like.” This is backed up by research which shows that Gen Z is more open to non-traditional forms of relationships.
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This has allowed what Viren calls “snake oil peddlers” to fill the gap by claiming that “if you follow these simple rules, you can find a date”. He points to the endless stream of online dating coaches, many of whom sell courses to people promising to help them find ‘the one’. Similarly, old-school dating books “are filling that space where older ideas get reified and regurgitated for a new audience”. There are also parallels between the resurgence of these books and the rise of the online tradwife figure and concept of ‘high-value’ dating. All might be seen as part of a wider rise in online misogyny, which has been fuelled by figures like Andrew Tate.
These outdated books are promising to simplify a process which can’t be simplified: that of falling in love. As Viren points out, scientific research has consistently shown that there “isn’t a single rule or behaviour that will guarantee someone a relationship”. We’re better off developing an understanding of ourselves so that we know what we want out of a relationship, he adds. Beyond this, “people should have an awareness of what healthy relationships look like and what a bad relationship might look like”.
Relationships have changed dramatically since the time in which these books were written. The modern dating landscape is messy and complicated – anything that promises to have the answers to this should be consigned to the dustbin of history.