There is very little useful dating advice or wisdom worth mentioning that comes from women about how to meet women.

As amazing as women are, they are perhaps particularly unsuited to give very credible advice to men on how to be successful with women. This piece is just the latest example of non-valuable information.

I have no idea what it’s like to be a woman. I freely admit as such. I can try to imagine what it might be like, but never for an instant would I pretend that I had anything but the faintest notion. There’s no shame in recognizing the border of your own ability to understand something.

And yet, there’s a worldwide cottage industry of women dispensing godawful advice to men on what they should and shouldn’t do when it comes to how to successfully meet and engage with women. Much of this advice is in conflict with itself or with reality. This piece, for instance, would have you believe that women want to be approached in bars, even though it’s widespread common knowledge that many women are (validly) worried about being accosted or drugged by a man in a bar. Don’t meet women in public, but DO approach them in an enclosed, dark space with liberal doses of alcohol in the mix? Really…

As distasteful as we may find that one guy’s stat-sheet for bedding women, the fact is that he appears to be having success with his tactic. For men in the trenches, that’s useful information. A man who annoys 99 women by chatting them up in public, but ends up happily married to 1 woman is not a failure or a creep or a loser. He’s an amazing success! Meeting a good partner is a dream come true.

Slightly more distasteful than creating a spreadsheet of your sex-life is living alone forever because you have no idea about how to interact with women.

There is no penalty for women who don’t know anything about how a man should approach women. The penalty for men? They die alone without producing offspring.

Not all men are gifted with swipably good looks. Some of us have to make an extra effort by actually engaging with women when we see them in public. Some men even use psychological crutches to trick themselves into having the confidence to approach women. And the author of this piece thinks we should kick those crutches away because they’re icky?

Here’s a simple truth: for most men, meeting women is not easy or simple. Advice like “man up” or “put yourself out there” or “be yourself” is useless pap. It will not get results. It does not work. There is no user manual for how to be a person. We shouldn’t wag our fingers at people who are trying their best to learn for themselves.

And women should think long and hard about the usefulness of their commentary on how men should meet women. The women in my life — like most women, I’m guessing — have the agency and intelligence to know how and when to navigate awkward social interactions.

If men internalized ALL of the dating advice we get from well-meaning women, we would be immobilized by the multitude of conflicting rules. And many men ARE paralyzed into doing nothing because these rules don’t make any sense. We call them incels.

The only way to have any hope of success is to ignore pieces like this. Do the opposite.

Or die alone.