6 Types Of People You Should Never Take Relationship Advice From

1. People Who Are Angry or Bitter

You don’t have to look hard to find dating advice being offered by people who have either unwillfully not been in a relationship in a very long time or who just had a bad breakup.

Their tips are more like complaints and involve a lot of warnings about the “game” or the “scene” or dating culture as a whole. In the case of men offering this kind of advice, it usually comes off as woman-hating and involves a lot of bitching about how women only go for assholes and douchebags.

When it’s women offering the advice, it’s a whole of lot of “how to avoid dating a jerk.” Either way, these people are way too cynical to be advising anyone and should just stick to angrily yelling at couples as they walk by in the park until they’re ready to rejoin the rest of us in the bar without making a scene.

2. People Who Focus Solely on Picking Up Hot People

The moronic advice related to this is offered almost exclusively by men. However, my take on hot woman came to me by way of my old bartending co-worker who used to say that no matter how hot the girl, somewhere in the world there’s a guy who won’t return her calls (I cleaned this up A LOT).

This isn’t a diss on the woman.

It’s simply a reminder that no matter how hot a girl is, she’s still just a person. A real connection is about a lot more than looks, and everyone has been rejected and hurt at some point in their life. So any douchebag advice that focuses on trying to level the playing field with a good-looking woman by using insult pickup lines, where a guy gives backhanded compliments to try to hurt a woman’s self-esteem to make her more approachable, has already missed the boat.

Hot people are just like anyone else and the best way to hit on them is to talk to them like anyone else. It honestly works better than you might think.

3. People Who View the Whole Thing as a Game

This is the kind of advice that is concerned more with hooking-up than with actually meeting someone.

It’s a lot of tips on how to pick people up at bars and tries to turn meeting someone into a numbers game: if you swing at enough balls, you’re bound to hit something. While most people might think this kind of advice is offered exclusively by men, it most certainly is not. Both men and women are offering advice that tries to turn meeting people into a scripted play.

For every man saying, “Tell her a joke, even if it’s not funny,” there is a woman saying, “Laugh at his jokes, even if they aren’t funny.”

Look, there is a difference between advice that can help you feel more confident and that will help you clue in to whether someone is interested, and advice that pushes you so far outside of your comfort zone that there’s no chance it will work for you. If these kinds of tips don’t constantly mention do what’s comfortable for you or acknowledge that it won’t work on everyone, skip it.

Picking up is fine, but as cheesy as it sounds, real connections take no calculations, just a bit of confidence to start a conversation and bit more to actually realize it’s going well.

4. People in Good Relationships a.k.a. Holier than Thou Advice

This advice tends to come from women who are in happy, healthy relationships and think it’s because they know everything.

This advice can perhaps be the most damaging for someone who is having a rough go of it on the single scene because the advice is being offered by people who have forgotten what being single is actually like. They make it sound frustratingly easy to get to where they are: Just find a guy (preferably a lawyer or a doctor. If worse comes to worse, an architect will do). Have him ask you out on a perfect first date. Get along with each other fantastically. Give him a blow job twice a week. Let him watch football undisturbed on Sundays, and six months later you’ll be engaged.

Actually, as far as snagging a guy goes, this advice might not be that bad. The hard part is finding the right guy though. Am I right, ladies?)

5. People in Bad Relationships

Like I mentioned in my article about marriage, even people in bad relationships seem to be in a hurry for their friends to get married and join them in their living hell.

While people in good relationships offer overly simplistic advice about how to make one work with the assumption that you have found the right person, people in bad relationships don’t give a crap about who your partner is. They just want you to be there on couple’s night to act as a buffer between them and their significant other. Who you go out with is of no concern to them so long as you’re playing Pictionary with them instead of being out at the bar having more fun than them. So yeah, people in bad relationships encouraging you to get in one are clearly offering suspect advice.

6. People Who Are Women

OK, hear me out. I’m not saying women can’t give relationship advice; I’m just saying they usually do a terrible job of it.

Maybe woman can give decent advice on how to attracted a guy (but a man can for sure do that better), or what to wear on a first date (again, guys can do this better), or topics to avoid on said date, but most women cannot give advice about what a man is thinking.

There is one simple reason for this: women constantly give men too much credit. If you are reading advice from a woman explaining what a man is thinking or why he did something and it is more than two sentences long then it has been put through a woman filter and is useless: If he doesn’t call you to see what you’re doing Friday night until 11pm on Friday then you’re an afterthought and just one step removed from a booty call. If he calls you on Monday to see what you’re doing Friday, he’s into you, and there’s a sliding scale of interest for every day in between. Period. The End. Let’s see a woman explain it that simply.