I've seen quite a bit of debate recently on the idea that women don't give great advice for men to be successful with women, and while I agree with the idea, I think that analogies are to offensively and incorrect to accurately describe what's really happening. Mainly because they rarely describe the women as an equal participant in the dating game, so let's use a better analogy: Offense and defense in football.

Both Tom Brady and Ed Reed play football, and are possible the best at their respective positions to ever play the game. Ed Reed spends alot of time, studying QBs, playing against QBS, and beating QBs, but chances are if you put him in the QB position he'd be terrible.

Why? Because play QB and playing FS require completely different skill sets.

Similarly, even though men and women are playing the same game per say, they're playing positions that require completely different skills sets. There's entire part of the game that Tom Brady needs to practice obsessively to do his job well, that Ed Reed probably hardly considers himself with because its not relevant to him doing his job, similarly, there are tons of things that men need to do that women are simply unaware of because they don't need to be concerned with it, and visa versa.

I think this analogy works better because:

  1. It doesn't demean the effort women put in on their own side of the dating game.

  2. It acknowledges both sides have knowledge of the game that is unknowable of the other side, even though they're playing against them on the same field.

  3. It's gets to the reason, why women tend to get bad advice: it's not because they're dumb, or purposefully trying to throw men off, it's because they simply don't have the experience with the concerns at that the other side of the ball has. Offensive players don't have to worry about blowing coverage, defense players don't have to worry about ball security. Similarly men and women have very different concerns when dating. Men don't have to worry about their physical safety(typically), women don't have to worry about not coming off as creeps(typically).

  4. It speaks to the analogy of overestimating one's own skills, aka Dunning Kruger

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

because women observe men in the dating game so much they are mistakeningly lead to believe they know more about how to perform the role of the men then she actually does. Similarly, a defensive player that's spends his life obsessing over how to beat quarterbacks could easily become overconfident in how much he knows about actually running an offense.