Why 2000s Dating Advice Is Suddenly Trending
A number of dating self-help books from the early 2000s have gone viral recently, but why? A new column explores how dating advice from a different era has come full circle and is now resonating with singles in 2023.
A new article from i-D highlights that dating advice from the 2000s have gone viral on TikTok, with hundreds of thousands of views. Examples of advice include suggestions that women shouldn’t communicate their feelings early on, which many now would consider outdated and misogynistic.
So why the sudden popularity of these 2000s insights?
Nichi Hodgson, author of ‘The Curious History of Dating: From Jane Austen to Tinder’, told i-D that a fondness for a pre-dating app era may be the reason. This nostalgia for meeting people in ‘traditional’ ways is reflected in books from a pre-dating app era. Another reason could be that the 2000s saw an increase in dating advice geared towards women, in what was a newly liberated and feminist time.
Viren Swami, a Professor of Social Psychology at Anglia Ruskin University, has a different hypothesis. He says dating in this previous era was ‘rules-based’, where following certain guidelines would get you a match.
Since the current dating climate is in flux, with many new ideas coming to the fore, Swami explains that this rules-based system can help some people to rationalise society today. However proponents of this aging approach are “snake oil peddlers”, he says.
Ultimately the article concludes that “the modern dating landscape is messy and complicated – anything that promises to have the answers to this should be consigned to the dustbin of history”.