Did you ever have to memorize a list of irregular English verbs? I did.

If you're a native English speaker, you might've had to learn how to spell them. But I bet you've never in your life mistakenly uttered thinked*, *eated or bed* or even had any temptation to - not as far as you can remember. That's because children learn these things naturally in their native environment, without the need for explicit instruction.

For a foreign learner, it's different. You're provided with a fairly simple algorithm but then you're also given a list of several dozen exceptions to that algorithm that you have to learn by heart. Then you start wondering why you didn't decide to learn Esperanto instead.

It's kind of the same with advice on dating and socializing given by people who have been good at it since before puberty. "Just talk to her and one thing will lead to another" - it's not that it doesn't happen, it's that it cannot be implemented by people who aren't already naturals.

It seems weird to normies that someone would want rigid rules for dating, with formulas and flowcharts and all that crap - they don't use those rules, they couldn't even articulate them because they don't know them - they just intuit them, same way many English speakers don't know what the hell a "pleonastic pronoun" is even though they use them every day without fail.

Of course, these things do eventually become second nature (I'm writing this in my fourth language and I'd like to think I'm doing pretty good). But until then, people who are socially unskilled really do need very explicit instructions on what to do and how to do it.

This is why pick-up and TRP are so attractive - they aren't necessarily more correct than mainstream advice, but they're certainly less vague and more actionable.

EDIT: this is what I get gilded for? Thanks, I guess.