From pickup lines to authenticity: how dating advice changed
For most of the last fifty years, dating advice for men has been a search for the right thing to say. First it was the perfect line. Then it was hypnotic language patterns. Then whole scripted routines. The current advice, from coaches, therapists, and even some former pickup artists, is close to the opposite: say what you actually think, and see who likes it.
People didn't suddenly get nicer. Each generation of technique hit the same wall, and the public finally noticed what some of those techniques were.
The line era
Advice books aimed at men trying to meet women go back decades. Eric Weber's How to Pick Up Girls! (1970) is often cited as an early landmark. Its big idea was that meeting women was learnable. You didn't have to be born smooth.
In popular culture, this era was all about the pickup line: a prepared opener, often a joke or a gimmick, that was supposed to get you past the first awkward moment. Pickup lines became a punchline in themselves, and that tells you most of what you need to know about how well they worked. A line gets you about four seconds. After that, you still have to have a conversation.
The technique era
In the late 1980s, Ross Jeffries began teaching what he called Speed Seduction, drawing on neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). The promise was bigger than a good opener. With the right language patterns, Jeffries taught, you could guide someone's emotional state.
This was a meaningful shift. The goal was no longer just to start a conversation, but to steer it. That idea, that there's a hidden technique for producing attraction in another person, would shape the next twenty years of pickup. NLP itself has very little scientific support. More in Ross Jeffries and Speed Seduction.
The routine era
From 1994 the Usenet group alt.seduction.fast gave men a place to pool techniques, and the material got more elaborate. By the 2000s, the most popular systems were full playbooks: openers, stories, games, and conversational moves to run in sequence, with names for each stage.
Neil Strauss's The Game (2005) brought this to a mass audience, following his time learning from the pickup artist Mystery. The Mystery Method followed in 2006, and VH1's The Pickup Artist put the approach on TV in 2007. For a while, the dominant idea of dating advice was a system you could memorize. Neil Strauss and The Game covers the book and its influence, and a short history of the pickup community fills in the rest.
The routine era also made the community's darker ideas famous. Negging, a backhanded compliment meant to knock someone's confidence, became widely known through The Game. Reviewers noticed. The Observer singled it out as a manipulative tactic.
Why the techniques stopped working
Even judged purely on results, technique-heavy advice had built-in problems.
It didn't survive real conversation. Scripts assume the other person plays their part. People don't.
It was easy to spot once it was famous. After The Game became a bestseller, plenty of people knew the routines too. A canned opener that thousands of men are using reads as a tell.
It left you with a stranger's personality. If someone liked the routine, they didn't necessarily like you. Many men found the results felt empty.
It invited the wrong mindset. Technique-driven advice frames the other person as a lock to pick. That framing leads straight to manipulation, and to the backlash that followed.
The honesty turn
In 2011 Mark Manson self-published Models: Attract Women Through Honesty. The title says most of it. Instead of routines, Manson argued for what he called non-neediness (not basing your sense of worth on others' approval), vulnerability, and being upfront about your interest, accepting that plenty of people won't be a match. Manson went on to write The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (2016) and moved toward general self-help. See Mark Manson's Models.
Then came the backlash. In November 2014, a pickup instructor named Julien Blanc was refused entry to the UK and had his Australian visa revoked after outrage over his seminar material. And in 2015 Neil Strauss himself published The Truth, a book about his struggles with commitment after his pickup years. In a piece for Slate, he wrote that he looked back on The Game and cringed, and described it as being about manipulating for an outcome the other person isn't aware of. By then, "neg" had a dictionary definition as a word for manipulation.
The center of gravity had moved. Not everyone moved with it, but mainstream advice increasingly said the same thing: be honest, be direct, and be someone worth getting to know.
What authenticity looks like when you approach
"Be yourself" is easy to say and hard to act on. Here's what it looks like in practice.
Say why you came over. Compare a line ("Did it hurt when you fell from heaven?") with the truth: "Hi, I saw you from over there and wanted to say hello." The second one is less clever. It also works better, because it's honest about your interest and gives the other person something real to respond to. See openers that work.
Use what's actually in front of you. "Is that a good book? I've been looking for something to read" beats any routine, because it's true and it's specific to this moment.
Share your real opinions. If you think the band is terrible, say so with a smile. Agreeing with everything is a kind of script too.
Show interest without pretending you're not interested. A lot of old advice was about seeming indifferent. Plain warmth is more attractive and less exhausting.
Accept the answer. If they're not interested, "no worries, have a good night" is the most confident thing you can say.
A warning: authenticity isn't a new trick
There's a risk of turning "be authentic" into the next technique: performing vulnerability on cue, or using honesty as a tactic to lower someone's guard. That misses the point.
Authenticity means letting people see who you really are, then letting them decide. Some will like it. Some won't. The ones who do are the ones worth meeting. How to approach someone you're attracted to puts this into practice step by step.
If you want to build the habit, Flow lets you log each approach and track your streak, so being honest with strangers becomes something you do every week.