The advice women are given about dating, relationships, and finding love largely falls into three categories.

1. How to not attract emotionally unavailable men

Instagram is full of relationship advice that tells women to take responsibility for their “healing”. It advises them on attachment styles, co-dependency, and emotional wounds, as well as how to deal with avoidant and narcissistic partners. Such advice varies in quality from patronising and exploitative, to nuanced and compassionate. Some of this advice is helpful, much of it is not.

“Loving yourself” is valued by modern society if it helps you to get ahead. Constant self-improvement is what matters in a performance-focused society that positions people as objects of enhancement and optimisation. Neoliberalism assumes women’s lives are shaped by deliberate choices for which they, as individuals, are responsible. Little attention is paid to the contexts that constrain women’s choices.

Being responsible for self-love and self-healing only furthers the responsibility that women already shoulder for their health, well-being, careers, and relationships.

2. How to get a man to commit

Women are instructed on how to develop “a huge advantage over other women” in the “battle” to “get him to put a ring on it”.

Not only are women encouraged to strategise their dating moves, they must also self-monitor to avoid emasculating men, with authors encouraging women to observe the rules of traditional femininity and let men “lead”.

The dating advice outlined in this category pits women against each other, polices women’s femininity, and reinforces a performance-centric framework of thinking about intimate relationships.

3. How to navigate toxic behaviours online

Online dating, while positive in some respects, is a minefield for toxic male behaviour.

This behaviour varies from rejection violence, where women are confronted with violence when turning down a man’s advances, to unsolicited graphic images, to more subtle forms of damaging behaviour. These include but are not limited to lovebombing, where men bombard women with attention in order to gain control, and breadcrumbing, where a person leads someone on but remains noncommittal.

Versuasion Pakistan – Fareeha Robert