I just saw a video talking about how "men don't ask women for advice on dating because men bad".

Reality is, women will tell you what worked for them, but that's dumb advice for men because they're women -- the whole experience of being a woman is fundamentally different than being a man, especially in dating.

In college, my mom gave me advice like "Just talk to women on the bus!" Well she was a decent looking middle-aged woman at the time, she could just strike up a conversation, and most men would find her perfectly tolerable. Women's mental space isn't like that. Women are much more defensive, especially with strange men. The concept of a "Barrage of bore" of guys trying to get with a pretty girl every day from their 16th birthday onwards is real. Women typically have too many men expressing interest and need to pare down the number of men asking, most men outside of the top 1% typically don't have virtually any women expressing interest and need to gin up leads to have someone to accept or reject in the first place.

Eventually I did date, and I got married, and I had to use totally different techniques than women did because I'm not a woman. I had to figure out how to seem safe, how to seem interesting, and how to be fun.

In the book "Self-made man", Norah Vincent talks about dating in her man disguise. I read the book all the way back in 2005, and the chapter on dating was the descent into darkness for Vincent. She went into it going "Stupid men, I'm a lesbian, I'll show these stupid men how to get women", but the pain she experienced realizing how she was treated as a man was palpable. It was clear that the simple acts of getting a new haircut, wearing a suit, binding her chest, and gluing some stubble to her face put her in a completely different class of person and she didn't realize she was going to walk into something like that.

Many people have also completed the experience of creating a dating profile of the opposite sex to see what it's like, and for women they're shocked at the silence even when they made their dream guy, and for men they're shocked at how they're inundated by attention even when they make a horrible woman.

"Just be nice and respectful" -- no, just be nice and respectful and don't be a sycophant and don't be boring, be exciting and fun and make her feel like you could be dangerous but not to her. She wants you to be dominant but to walk a fine line where you're dominant without being domineering. It's a load of paradoxes because human beings are paradoxical.

The whole "nice guy" syndrome is in a sense a reaction to guys who did listen to women and get frustrated that the advice is bad. "I was fuckin nice just like you told me, and instead of getting a girlfriend I got a girl friend. This is bullshit I didn't want a girl friend." -- A woman who followed men's advice would likely face a similar but different frustration if she were following men's dating advice. She can't bang every guy who hits on her who seems nice. In fact, we do see that on dating apps, were women end up having sex with men who are really attractive, but they find they can't actually get a boyfriend, she just gets a friend with benefits.

By the way, I later realized that as a man I was filled with similar paradoxes. When a man hasn't had the girlfriend who wants sex all the time but actually all the time, the hot girlfriend who is also too crazy, the fun girlfriend who doesn't have any responsibility, you start to realize you don't want what you think you wanted.

Consider two groups. One lives in a fortress with a granary, the other lives on the steppe. What do you do if under attack? For the first group, you hunger down behind safe walls and eat your accumulated grain until the enemy loses interest and leaves. For the second group, you run away on your horses because you can probably outrun them. Both are legitimate tactics, but totally unapplicable to one another.

You can say "that's not fair!" -- but life isn't fair, and the quicker you learn that, the happier life will be.