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Anna Kai believes in self-gaslighting. On TikTok, as @itsmaybeboth, she markets beauty products for Garnier, Nivea, and Nexxus Hair Care while dispensing relationship advice to her 1.3 million followers. “If you can gaslight yourself into believing the man that doesn’t love you actually loves you, then why can’t you gaslight yourself into believing you will find a man who actually does?”
For Blaine Anderson, finding the right partner is all about savvy marketing, which “great guys often SUCK at,” a note on her website exclaims. She has hacks for every possible scenario that can, and will, arise during the dating process: how to text like a “high-value man,” what first-date mistakes to avoid, how to make women obsessed, and the best ways to attract them without talking. In case you were curious, it starts with good posture and grooming. “If you haven’t been shopping since the Obama administration, it’s time,” she says in a video uploaded to TikTok in May.
If you haven’t heard, it’s boom times for dating influencers. According to a new survey of single adults aged 18 to 62 conducted by the app Flirtini, one in four people rely on TikTok as their primary source of relationship information, and almost 50 percent of people surveyed turn to social media for dating advice. This phenomenon has created an ecosystem of thoughtful, overzealous, trend-chasing dating influencers who think they know what’s best for you.
“As a relationship therapist, I’ve literally spent my career studying the art of attraction and human psychology, so I know that these things work,” Kimberly Moffit, a Toronto-based psychotherapist, said in a TikTok video that elicited over 5,800 comments. Maybe your crush is shy and you want to know if he is “micro-flirting” with you? One tell-tale sign: dirty jokes. “An aggressive guy is just gonna hit on you,” she said, “but a shy guy is really gonna test the waters first.”
The marketplace is now overrun with gurus offering up romantic hacks and how-tos to anyone who will listen. Everyone from credentialed therapists and life coaches to that annoying friend who just discovered bell hooks’ All About Love and wants to share everything they learned brands themselves a dating influencer these days. The effect has been seismic. On TikTok, the hashtags #datingadvice and #relationshipadvice have upwards of 16 billion views.
And it’s not all bad advice per se. Kai’s self-gaslighting tip is actually quite clever. (Kai and the other influencers mentioned in this story did not respond to messages seeking comment.) There’s just one problem: Relationship misinformation is spreading fast.
A growing number of young adults now get their news from TikTok, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center study, “so it makes sense that they’d turn to the app for relationship advice too,” says Liesel Sharabi, a professor at Arizona State University who specializes in the effect technology has on interpersonal relationships. The increased reliance on the platform as a go-to source for romantic guidance has led many users to form parasocial relationships with advice-giving influencers. Unlike face-to-face, IRL relationships, these tend to be one-way. But emotionally, they feel like the real thing.
“Someone might feel like they’re getting dating advice from a trusted friend because they’ve developed such a strong sense of familiarity and connection with that person,” Sharabi says. “The problem is that when it comes to dating, there are plenty of people who call themselves experts on TikTok without any sort of training or qualifications, which can make it difficult to separate fact from opinion.”
Not all advice is created equal. As dating influencers gain more traction across social media, the proliferation of relationship misinformation becomes harder to contain. This, Sharabi describes, is “false or misleading information about relationships that can’t be evaluated using scientific data and which may perpetuate harmful stereotypes.”
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The increased spread of questionable dating advice is having real-world consequences. According to the Flirtini study, 46 percent of people faced relationship struggles after following TikTok advice, with 23 percent saying it led to a break up. It begs the question: Has our need to be plugged in all the time—let's face it, many of us are hooked on the booze of social media—outweighed our rationale as humans, leading people to look for advice from the wrong people?
“Relationship advice that is attention-grabbing may not always be the most sound or accurate to people’s actual relationship needs,” says Aparajita Bhandari, an academic at the University of Waterloo who’s conducted research on TikTok. “The way our current online attention economy works breeds content that is outrageous or tends toward misinformation because it is what goes viral and gets views. Unhealthy ideas or advice can spread so quickly on a platform like TikTok that it can be difficult to even trace back to one specific source.”
For some dating influencers, love is not actually the endgame—status and comfort are. There is a dedicated core of influencers who can teach you how to marry rich, live comfortably, and never work again. For them, it is all about “high-value” dating. Love is simply the icing on the cake to a life of worry-free, jet-setting luxury.
Shera Seven is a household name among this contingent of relationship hustlers, beloved for her matter-of-fact approach to modern partnership. In her eyes, love is nothing more than a business transaction. “Make sure the second date is a money date. The faster you get him to spend money, the faster he attaches to you,” Seven recommended in a recent post. “You’re seeing him as a provider, a baller—and he might not even see himself that way—but now that you are perceiving him that way, he’s going to start acting that way. Drag him into your delusion.”
Influencers with large followings like Seven, Cam Donnez, and Niko of The Daddy Academy carry an impression of social authority, and therefore credibility, says Makana Chock, a communications professor at Syracuse University. But something else is also at work. More and more, TikTok is being used as a search engine in the same way many of us use Google.
“Relationships are areas where people often feel the greatest insecurities and need advice. We are sometimes, however, reluctant to turn to personal contacts for help,” Chock adds. “We may be reluctant to reveal weaknesses, concerned about close others’ conflicting motivations, or skeptical about their relationship skills.”
But relying too heavily on TikTok’s algorithm has repercussions, especially in matters of the heart. “The algorithm isn’t necessarily incentivized to recommend the most scientifically sound advice,” Sharabi says. “It’s going to prioritize content that leads to engagement in terms of likes, followers, and views. What makes something go viral on TikTok isn’t necessarily that it’s good advice—in some cases, it might even be the opposite.”
