Men nowadays are afraid of doing or saying the wrong thing – as they should be! Now, very few men are going to assume that uninterested means keep trying.

Think about how this sort of messaging plays out in the post-#MeToo era. The message that the rules-followers want young women to send to young men boils down to ‘not interested means keep trying’. Now, perhaps this was true 100 years ago, but I can tell you with great certainty that this is not true today. Too many women have been taught to believe that the way into a man’s heart is ignoring his messages and rebuffing his advances. Every time I use this line on the lecture circuit, men in the audience nod in unison, while the women look at me like I’m crazy. The problem is today’s men don’t actually think this way, which is why so many of the fabulous, 40-something women I’ve interviewed for my books can’t understand why they’re still single despite having followed all ‘the rules’.” #MeToo has altered the dating landscape. Their underlying philosophy is that men will lose interest in you the moment you show interest in them. Of course, the bible of the play-hard-to-get crowd is The Rules, the success of which began a host of copycats like Why Men Love Bitches and Ignore the Guy, Get the Guy. “A big theme of Make Your Move is pushing back against the ‘play hard to get’ advice that has been the dominant message of most dating books written for women over the past 30 years. What does that say, then, about relationships that begin not with magical moments, but with anxiety, fact-checking, and escape plans? It’s incredibly hard to fall in like or love if you’re spending the entire first date worried that Robert the handsome hedge fund manager might actually be Billy Bob the married ex-con.” The so-called rules of dating are outdated. Science shows there is a profound connection between the stories of how we first meet and the stories of what we become as couples. Every day, there’s some online dating horror story like this one. “The physical dangers associated with online dating are ruining romance.

Today, as the world marks the annual day of love, we share 10 takeaways from our conversation with this accidental dating guru.

Having returned to the genre with his 2021 release Make Your Move, the author is not only more comfortable with advising single women worldwide, but also encouraging them to question the clichés that come with romance.

An award-winning business journalist and a former senior writer at Fortune, he admits to venturing into the self-help genre with a “snooty attitude” when he wrote his 2015 book Date-onomics, which analysed modern-day dating by crunching numbers.

Jon birger date onomics