Anna Kai believes in self-illumination. On TikTok, like @itsmaybebothmarkets beauty products for Garnier, Nivea and Nexxus Hair Care while providing relationship advice to her 1.3 million followers. “If you can fool yourself into believing that the man who doesn’t love you actually loves you, then why can’t you fool yourself into believing that you’ll find a man who actually loves you?”
For Blaine Anderson, finding the right partner is all about smart marketing, something “great guys often suck at,” exclaims a note on his website. He has tricks for every possible scenario that could—and will—arise during the dating process: how to text like a ““man of high value”, that Mistakes to avoid on a first dateas obsess womenand the best ways to attract them without talkingIn case you were curious, it all starts with good posture and self-care. “If you haven’t gone shopping since the Obama administration, it’s time to do so,” she says in a video posted to TikTok in May.
“As a relationship therapist, I’ve literally spent my career studying the art of attraction and human psychology, so I know this stuff works,” said Kimberly Moffit, a Toronto-based psychotherapist. saying in a TikTok video from 2022. Maybe your crush is shy and you want to know if he or she is “microflirting” with you? A telltale sign: dirty jokes. “An aggressive guy is just going to hit on you,” she said. saying“But a shy guy is really going to test the waters first.”
If you haven’t heard, these are boom times for influencer dating. According to a new survey In a study conducted by the dating app Flirtini among single adults ages 18 to 62, one in four people rely on TikTok as their primary source of relationship information, and nearly 50 percent of people surveyed turn to social media for dating advice.
This phenomenon has created an ecosystem of thoughtful, enthusiastic, trend-following dating influencers who think they know what’s best for you. The market is now overrun with gurus offering romantic hacks and practical advice to anyone willing to listen. Everyone from accredited therapists and life coaches to that annoying friend who just discovered the bell hooks dating app. all about love and wants to share everything he learned, he calls himself an influencer in the dating world today. The effect has been tremendous. On TikTok, the hashtags #datingadvice and #relationshipadvice have more than 16 billion views.
And it’s not all bad advice per se. Kai’s advice on fooling yourself is actually pretty smart. (Kai and the other influencers mentioned in this story did not respond to messages seeking comment.) There’s just one problem: Misinformation about relationships is spreading fast.
A growing number of young adults now get their news from TikTok, according to a 2023 study Pew Research Center Study“so it makes sense that they would also turn to the app for relationship advice,” says Liesel Sharabi, a professor at Arizona State University who specializes in the effect technology has on interpersonal relationships. The increasing reliance on the platform as a source of romantic guidance has led many users to form parasocial relationships with advice-giving influencers. Unlike face-to-face relationships in real life, these tend to be one-way. But emotionally, they feel like the real thing.
“Someone may feel like they are getting dating advice from a trusted friend because they have developed a strong sense of familiarity and connection with that person,” Sharabi says. “The problem is that when it comes to dating, there are a lot of people calling themselves TikTok experts without any training or qualifications, which can make it difficult to separate fact from opinion.”
Not all advice is the same. As dating influencers gain more traction on social media, the proliferation of relationship misinformation becomes harder to contain. This, Sharabi describes, is “false or misleading information about relationships that cannot be evaluated using scientific data and can perpetuate harmful stereotypes.”
