Dating advice for men

Well this is a strange thing to write about on an economics blog, isn’t it? When I started this blog, I made a deal with myself that I’d write about whatever I felt like writing about, even if it doesn’t fit my usual output. I’ve given my sci-fi and anime recommendations, talked about my clinical depression, and even published a chat with a robot. I also did one self-help post, about how to have friends past age 30:

How to have friends past age 30 Noah Smith · April 25, 2025 Read full story

But today might be the strangest post of all — I’m going to give some dating advice for men. If that doesn’t interest you, my apologies; I’ll be back with more econ-ish content in the next post.

For what it’s worth, I do think dating advice is an important topic of public concern. Data on romance and relationships is always iffy, because it’s based on surveys where definitions change, people lie, and samples tend to be biased. But it sure looks like young Americans aren’t dating as much anymore. Here’s Shadi Hamid in the Washington Post:

Over two-thirds of young adults have either not dated at all or only gone on a few dates in the last year. One of the main reasons? They lack confidence and don’t know how to approach the opposite sex, according to a report on America’s “dating recession” from the Wheatley Institute and the Institute for Family Studies…If trends continue, one-third of young adults will not get married and one-fourth won’t have kids.

Anecdotally, from talking to younger people and looking at other data sources, this seems to be the general trend. And I think it’s a negative trend, because having done happiness research in grad school, I’m well aware that romantic relationships are one of the most important predictors of long-term happiness.¹ Young Americans have become much more unhappy, so I think if people had better dating lives, some of that could be reversed. Better romantic relationships could also help the fertility rate — these days, birth rate collapse is due mostly to fewer and fewer people forming couples at all.

So here’s a blog post with my dating advice. I realize that many of my readers will not find this post particularly useful. It’s specifically aimed at men, so if you’re a woman, I apologize — as a man, I’m just much more qualified to talk to other men about this. Also, most of my male readers are probably already married or in relationships, so they probably don’t need this advice. So I hope that even if it’s not useful, this post will still be entertaining to the people who don’t need it.

Also, before you read this post, please be warned: I’m going to talk very matter-of-factly about sex and sexuality. If you think sex is a topic unbecoming for a serious econ blogger to talk about, or if you feel it’s taboo or sacred, then please skip this post and accept my apologies. Personally, I think our society’s romantic problems are well past the point where we can afford to treat sex as something mystical that will just take care of itself without us needing to think or talk about it explicitly, but if you disagree, I respect that.

Additionally, please be warned that although I will sometimes use the word “girls” to mean “women”, in keeping with the American colloquial usage of the term “girls” to refer to adult women in a romantic context, everything I say should be taken to only apply to adults and adult relationships. (And now is a good time to say — and it should also go without saying — that the most important piece of advice when dating is to always obtain consent.)

You’ll also notice that my advice is very general stuff. It’s not about techniques for getting a date or getting someone into bed. It’s about how to think about dating — who to get advice from, what to expect from a normal dating life, how to be comfortable about various aspects of the process, and so on. I view specific techniques for attracting women as less important — they’re heavily dependent on cultural context, personality type, and a bunch of other factors. In general, I think once you have the right mindset about dating and romance, you can just experiment to find the specific methods that work.

My basic pieces of dating advice for men are: