Popular Advice Is Making Women Impossible to Date

What sorting culture actually broadcasts.

Author. Trying to open a locked door by creating more resistance. It never works.

The easiest thing to believe is that most men are bad and the few good ones are married.

I know. I used to believe that.

It wasn’t my fault. I still hear it every week. I see it in my online world daily. My online world that is heavily curated. No scrolling. No reels.

Yet, I still hear this idea spoken as fact, from women who are so smart.

And the math has never worked.

The idea that almost none of the men on the planet are decent is just a mood.

Can you see that?

It’s a cultural vibration that we are currently living in.

Just like the red pill mood. Just like the Liberal vs. Republican mood.

Moods start to feel like facts when enough people share them.

The internet makes sharing bad ideas so easy.

I am in relationship with a good man. I know other good men. You do too.

They exist in numbers.

A lot of my older essays were written when I was trying to work my way out of this hot, sticky mood. You can see that.

This set of essays exist as a way out of my own conditioning. They are the map to how I found a middle road.

It was actually quite difficult.

I had to heavily limit my social media use.

I had to heavily edit my friend circle.

I had to create a way to listen to myself and to be honest about the life experience I was creating.

To be honest, my personal experiences with men did add weight to the narrative. I wasn’t always engaging with men that had emotional control and integrity even once I believed they existed.

You are going to meet people at your same vibration.

I understand how that sounds, and I mean it literally.

If you are negative, if you walk into every meeting with a new person by sorting a stranger against a list of arbitrary qualities you read online or picked up in a therapy session, you will meet people at that exact vibration.

So I met negative men. Men who didn’t deeply believe women are good. Men who sorted me into dangerous categories the moment I did something to break their scripts about how I should be.

Other people are your mirror.

You will match each other’s subconscious moods perfectly and confirm each other’s deeper limiting beliefs.

The advice women get right now trains this.

Red-flag content. Screening scripts. Whole empires devoted to teaching you that a man’s texting reveals his character. Most of it comes from women who are very angry, and from an algorithm that really only gets paid through your outrage. Following it will keep you exactly where they are.

Your life becomes your strongest emotional state.

Here’s what I did instead to enter a solid relationship with a man, since I get asked fairly often.

First, I did not give up one core non-negotiable. Not one. I had a short list: no lying at all, no man who is leaky with other women in any way, no arrangement that stays confusing for years while a life never gets built.

My standards weren’t too high.

What changed was the energy I held them in.

For a while I held them the way the internet teaches. Guarded. Sorting. Interviewing a man across the table while pretending to have dinner.

Burn the haystack to find the needle.

It felt like rigor. It read, as contempt (read that ten times to solve all your relationship issues). And contempt attracts men who expect contempt from women, because that is what they believe women are.

Then I stopped. Not the standards. The guarding. I relaxed. I went back to my actual life, which I loved. I ate dinner alone or with my kids and enjoyed it. I did my work and took care of my health and my house. I healed my old wounds with men instead of carrying them on dates as a screening tool. I did that live and online — in a way that brought me joy.

I started being more available, less hidden — but I stopped looking. I was just out in the world, relaxed, easy to talk to, genuinely ok. My standards were still fully intact.

They just weren’t in my hands like a clipboard anymore.

And when a man crossed the list, I ended it, and I learned to do that from kindness instead of punishment. Dragging something along after you already know it’s dead isn’t kind to anyone. The kind thing is to release him quickly, so he can go find the woman who actually wants what he’s offering, and so you don’t spend another year becoming someone who resents men.

The women I know who found real partners all look like this.

Their own unique standards intact, energy clean. The women still cycling through terrible dates are, almost without exception, the best students of dating advice I know. They can name every red flag and diagnose an avoidant from a single text. They are extremely guarded and extremely prickly. There’s a tight edge around their emotions all the time.

So dear men and women, before you tighten the filters again, sit at dinner by yourself and ask what you’re actually broadcasting.

The people you keep meeting are not a report on society.

They are a reading on you.

I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com. You can book a call about 1–1 coaching or take my $27 self-study courses & co-ed workshops for men and women.

Christina Elaine is a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. She hosts interviews on YouTube.

She also owns a tutoring company, Connected Tutors, and is raising three teens.