# Epistemology of Romance, Part 2

In [Part 1](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ye35Abgqp7cqtcTEj/epistemology-of-romance-part-1), I argued that the four main sources most people learn about romance from—media, family, religion/culture, and friends—are all unreliable in different ways. None of them are optimized for truth, and each comes with its own incentives, blind spots, and distortions.

As I said, I'm not the first to notice that we're failing, as a society, to provide good answers to these questions. There are researchers from various fields trying to provide answers, some rigorously, and some… less so. There are also communities and influencers trying to create a fifth source of romantic advice, independent from the traditional sources, each with their own biases and incentives.

The Counterreaction: Red, Black, and Blue Pills
===============================================

I don't know if you've noticed, but at risk of being a stereotypical old man despairing over the youths of the day… I think the kids actually aren't alright, this time.

Not because I think they're doing something wrong by my own values or frame of what romance "should" be, but because the data shows unprecedented levels among the younger generations in lack of dating experience, loneliness, and confusion that enables the unprecedented popularity of "give me money and I'll tell you what no one else will" grifters like Andrew Tate.

To understand how we got here, it helps to understand [Pendulum Swings](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8FsLyk6oDrhoqWEjB/pendulums-policy-level-decisionmaking-saving-state) in the ways cultures develop:

![](https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/1*PJatXdRYlABmcPCVz7owPg.png)

For most of history, dating advice and sexual norms were dominated by traditional frameworks—religious, mostly patriarchal, focused on marriage as economic institution. These frameworks were extremely functional in many ways for the time periods they evolved in, but their problems began to become more and more apparent as education levels rose, particularly for women: limited autonomy, shame around sexuality or any sort of deviance from gender norms, and narratives that took occasional male misbehavior for granted.

The various waves of progressive response to this (largely overlapping with feminism, but going beyond that, and overall characterized as "the blue pill" by The Red Pill community, a reference to Morpheus in The Matrix offering Neo a pill that puts them back to sleep as opposed to waking them up to reality), developed little by little over decades, pushed toward a more egalitarian ideal. The goals were genuinely good: protect women from coercion, establish clearer consent norms, challenge unfair double standards, and create space for people to pursue relationships and sex on their own terms. It did this in large part by rejecting a lot of absolutist, black and white claims about gender, sexuality, and dating.

But pendulums rarely stop at the objective truth. The progressive correction got a lot right, and its models on balance moved us closer to the truth than what they were reacting to. But even that idea, "the truth" is misleading; dating narratives were a cluster of claims and frames, not a single one, and progressive counter-narratives overcorrected on some more than others. Many overgeneralized "is"s got blamed for the "ought"s that people built over them, new blind spots replaced old ones, and the messaging that was pushed outward, and that many young people absorbed, ended up containing its own set of distortions.

Parallel to all this, an older subculture called "Pick-Up Artists" (PUA) had been floating around the internet since the early 2000s. It contained some useful advice, but mostly only worked off a mix of a narrow goal post (scoring with women, not forming long term, healthy relationships) and manipulative negative-sum practices. It was also pretty obscure, fairly confined to forums and a few books that mainstream culture largely ignored.

Then came the counter-counterreaction.

The Empowering Red Pill
-----------------------

I watched this community grow first hand in the 2010s, and spent a few years moderating a subreddit that tried to debunk its claims while staying out of the Red vs Bluepill frameworks altogether. Its popularity was based on a central message of debunking lies spread by most media and culture, and pushed a mix of PUA ideas and concrete advice for young men looking for sex and romance:

*   Work on yourself (hit the gym, dress well, get a job)
*   Be confident, ask for what you want
*   Don't put women on pedestals (their terminology was somewhat different)

The Red Pill got popular in part because this advice is *actually good*. Young men lacking in concrete advice could and sometimes did find dating success from shifting to the mindset it advocated.

Unfortunately, not only was none of that advice particularly novel, it came in a wrapping that unapologetically also stated that women are less capable than men, not just intellectually but also romantically, and that they'd only stay faithful if you demonstrated power over them, whether financial, sexual, or other.

Not that this part of the message was really new either. What's interesting to consider is why it exploded in popularity when PUA culture had remained relatively niche.

Part of the answer, I think, is just the way social media, particularly Reddit and 4chan, made it easier for niche and countercultural communities to be more accessible than ever before. But I think there's something more specific going on: the failures of traditional culture, followed by some progressive overcorrections, created a vacuum that these movements filled.

As discussed in Part 1, if you're a young man struggling with dating looking for guidance, here's what you often find:

*   Media that show unrealistic romantic scripts where guys are either chiseled action heroes who effortlessly get women, or very average guys whose niceness, persistence, and willingness to make grand gestures always win the (often substantially more attractive) girl's hearts
*   Parents whose advice tends to stop at "be yourself" and "be nice" and "just put yourself out there and you'll find someone who loves you for you."
*   A progressive cultural message that often treats male desire as inherently suspect, and many expressions of traditional masculinity as toxic
*   Educational content focused on what *not* to do (don't harass, don't pressure, don't be creepy) without much on what *to* do that take into account the realities of physical attractiveness and social status. 

And then along comes someone who says, bluntly: "That's all bullshit. Here's what actually works."

The Red Pill positioned itself as the antidote to comfortable lies. And because it contained *some* truth—confidence does matter, looks and money do matter, people's stated preferences don't always match their revealed ones—it felt like a revelation to young men whose experience didn't match the egalitarian theory they'd been taught.

And while they were accepting those truths, they were also accepting toxic frames that justified themselves by treating the worst examples of shitty behavior by as representative of the entire gender. Frames that were memetically fit enough to turn the community into its own self-perpetuating [egregore](https://www.lesswrong.com/w/egregores).

Just like the four major sources of romance tropes from Part 1, the Red Pill and influencers like Andrew Tate that rode its wave have their own incentives that warp the narratives they push:

*   **Community through shared grievance.** Bonding over shared resentment creates a sense of belonging and identity. Echo chambers become safe spaces where self-serving narratives don't get challenged, and where admitting things are more complicated feels (and is treated as) betrayal.
*   **Monetization through desperation.** The more hostile they paint the dating world, the more  hopeless you feel without their guidance, and the more you'll consume their content and pay for their courses.
*   **Simplicity.** "Women are like X" is easier to teach (and sell) than "people are complicated and context-dependent." Portraying the "ideal man" as a single set of traits is easier to package than acknowledging that different people are attracted to different things, and that your individual traits may appeal to some women but not the one you've set your heart on.
*   **Engagement through outrage.** [The Toxoplasma of Rage](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/) incentivizes the sharing of the most extreme and angering examples of women or dating culture gone wrong. Moderate, representative examples don't go viral; horror stories do, and are comforting in their reinforcing.
*   **Sunk cost and identity lock-in.** Once you've adopted the framework, publicly argued for it, and organized your social life around it, admitting it's wrong means admitting you wasted years and alienated people for nothing. Many who do end up walking away find it extremely diffiicult, and are full of remorse for the hurt they caused.
*   **Explanatory power over predictive power.** The framework can "explain" any outcome after the fact (she left because you weren't alpha enough; she stayed because you maintained frame), which feels like understanding without ever being falsifiable. This creates an illusion of insight.

The Red Pill and its avatars spread a framework that turns dating into war, and war is not a good foundation for truth-seeking, let alone intimacy. It also created an offshoot subculture that's, in some ways, even worse.

The Comforting Black Pill
-------------------------

If the Red Pill is cynical, the Black Pill is nihilistic. Where Red says "the game is rigged but you can win if you learn the rules," Black says "the game is rigged and there's nothing you can do about it." This is the endpoint of despair: a worldview where self-improvement is cope, where women are shallow beyond redemption, where the only honest response is bitter resignation or worse.

And it's not just men. There's a mirror-image version in certain extreme feminist spaces—communities where men aren't just doing harm from being badly socialized, but because men as a gender are *irredeemably toxic.* Where heterosexual attraction is a form of false consciousness, where any woman who reports positive experiences with men is considered deluded or a "pick-me." It's a smaller and less loud portion of the blogosphere, but it paints with just as broad a brush, and ruins its fair share of lives too.

Both versions follow a similar pattern with the Red Pill: take a series of bad experiences, take a few somewhat true claims (looks matter a lot for initial attraction in dating), filter them through the most cynical possible narrative, and conclude that an entire gender is fundamentally alien and hostile to you. The manosphere version says women are fundamentally manipulators incapable of love. The misandrist version says men are fundamentally predators incapable of empathy. Neither leaves room for the possibility that their sample was skewed, their interpretations were biased, or that the problem may actually be, well, something *they* did.

But these communities feel validating because they take real pain seriously—pain that often gets dismissed elsewhere. Sexual and romantic loneliness is an extremely painful and alienating experience, but while most who experience it don't call themselves "incels," those susceptible to validation paired with bitterness toward the opposite gender are spreading a different story, one that's self-serving to believe and spread:

*   **Absolution through helplessness.** If nothing you do matters, your failures aren't your fault—which means there's strong motivation to believe nothing matters. Evidence that effort could help is threatening, so it gets dismissed or explained away.
*   **"Survivorship" bias.** People who go through periods of despair and then self-improve, get help, or just grow up, leave. The ones who stay are the ones for whom nothing has worked yet. The community's "data" about what's possible comes exclusively from people who haven't found a way out.
*   **Cynicism as credibility.** The most pessimistic take is treated as the most honest and clear-eyed. Optimism is naive; hope is cope. This creates a ratchet where nuance or good news gets dismissed as bluepilled delusion, and only the darkest interpretations survive, so that even those who *do* get out are shouted down if they try to share what worked for them.
*   **Unfalsifiability through scope.** Any counterexample—a short guy with a girlfriend, an ugly man who's happy—gets explained away as an exception, or cope, or secret wealth, or the woman is broken in some way that causes her to settle.
*   **Simplicity.** "It's over because of your canthal tilt" is a cleaner narrative than "dating is hard, social skills are learnable, rejection is survivable, and your situation is particular to you." Clean stories are more shareable and more satisfying, even when they're wrong.
*   **Community through shared despair.** There's dark comfort in finding others who confirm that the world is as bleak as you suspected—and who won't challenge you to do the hard work of changing. But it also means the only "information" circulating is whatever reinforces the hopelessness.

The Virtuous Blue Pill
----------------------

The Red Pill gains traction partly because mainstream progressive culture has its own distortions—places where the map doesn't match the territory, and pointing this out gets you labeled as problematic at best.

I want to be careful here. The progressive project around consent and gender equality has done enormous good. Clear consent norms have prevented real harm, and challenging sexist double standards has made life better for billions of people. I am not arguing for a return to traditional frameworks.

But good intentions don't guarantee accurate maps, and some of what gets communicated, especially to young people, doesn't match reality in ways that leave them confused and vulnerable to worse alternatives.

*   **Simplicity.** Like Red and Black, the progressive narratives often fall prey to oversimplification. "Consent is always clear and verbal" is easier to teach, easier to enforce institutionally, and easier to defend legally than "consent is often negotiated through context, subtext, and body language." The simplified version prevents many worst-case outcomes, but leaves people unprepared for how much of human sexuality actually works.
*   **Coalition maintenance.** Acknowledging sex differences, evolutionary influences on attraction, or that some traditional dating dynamics work for many people risks being seen as giving ground to the enemy. In polarized environments, nuance looks like defection.
*   **Protecting the vulnerable.** When the goal of any system becomes too absolute, it's incapable of tradeoffs. Preventing harm is a worthy goal, but inconvenient truths go by the wayside, and can cause people to feel stifled and shamed for being "wrong" in some way they can't help.
*   **Uncomfortable truths enable bad actors.** If you admit that most women do find confidence more attractive than kindness, or most guys do find younger women more attractive than those their age, well, The Red Pill says that too, and uses it to justify being assholes. So there's pressure to deny truths that bad actors also acknowledge.
*   **Blank-slate ideology as moral necessity.** If you believe that acknowledging innate sex differences leads to justifying inequality, you're motivated to deny those differences exist. A just society requires treating people as identical, therefore people must *be* identical, therefore any evidence of difference must be wrong or sexist.
*   **Young male sexuality as threat.** The focus on protecting women means the emphasis on young men's attraction is primarily all the ways it makes women uncomfortable or unsafe. which makes their desire is something to be ashamed of and contained, not something natural to be expressed appropriately.
*   **Selection effects in who sets the narrative.** The people most likely to be writing progressive content about dating and consent are the people who've had bad experiences, or for whom Clear, Enthusiastic Consent culture works well. Speaking against it feels like defection, or worse, excusing sexual assault.

It's genuinely hard to navigate these issues with nuance. The woman who only feels safe if her date asks her if it's okay to hold her hand, let alone kiss her, shares the same dating pool as the woman who finds it a massive turnoff to be asked if she's okay with being kissed. Solving this issue is never going to be doable by a single narrative.

Evolutionary Psychology
-----------------------

There's one more framework worth addressing, because it comes up constantly in these debates: evolutionary psychology.

I considered calling this section "The Intellectual Grey Pill" or something to highlight the way it functions as a similar narrative framework to the others. But evo-psych isn't a social movement or cultural gestalt: at its best, it's a rigorous scientific field that offers mechanistic explanations for patterns that most of the other frameworks either outright deny or take as gospel, as suits their biases.

Why do many women find status attractive? Why do many men prioritize youth and physical appearance? Why are certain kinks so common? "Because evolution" isn't always a sufficient explanation, but it's often a necessary component that can cut through the bullshit and gets at something real.

Evo-psych has the potential to be truth-tracking in ways that ideological movements don't. It also means we should hold its claims to a higher standards, be quick to call out when it fails to meet them, and be especially wary of other frameworks misrepresenting its findings to support their narratives.

Unfortunately, there's a wide gap between rigorous evolutionary psychology and pop evo-psych.

Real and good research exists—the journal [Evolution and Human Behavior](https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/evolution-and-human-behavior/issues) has plenty of peer reviewed studies on mate preferences across cultures, hormonal influences on attraction, on the evolutionary benefits or downsides of jealousy and pair-bonding in mammals, and so on.  The [Buss Lab](https://labs.la.utexas.edu/buss/publications/) at UT Austin puts out various papers and books that try to answer questions on mate selection and sexual desire from an evo-psych lens. Grab a handful of salt when reading any of it, by all means, but just because good science is more difficult to do in some fields than others doesn't mean it's impossible, and it's important that there are people trying hard to ask the right questions and find answers with real explanatory power.

Still, it's worth emphasizing that what most people encounter is the pop-science version: just-so stories dressed up in scientific language, where a study showing a statistical tendency becomes "all women are biologically driven to want Y" by the time it reaches social media. The field's genuine insights are real, but they're buried under a mountain of oversimplification, motivated reasoning, and hot-takes that conveniently confirm what the speaker already believed.

The progressive reaction to all this, particularly at the extreme ends, tends to default to throwing it all out as pseudoscience. But no map of romance and sexuality would be complete without real biological knowledge of human sexuality, and that includes psychological knowledge. The Red and Black Pill, meanwhile, will happily cherry-pick whatever research supports their beliefs and overstate it, assuming they interpret the research correctly in the first place.

Real researchers understand that evolutionary influences are *variable*, not uniform. We can see this in other animals—different individuals within the same species pursue different reproductive strategies, and both can be evolutionarily viable.

Some male mammals invest heavily in a single mate and their offspring; others spread their genes widely without sticking around to raise the kids. Both strategies persist because both can work, depending on environment and competition. There's no reason to think humans would be different. The devoted father who bonds deeply with his partner and children is enacting one strategy. The man who prioritizes short-term mating and moves on is enacting another. One may be more ethical to our modern eyes, and lead to more stable societies, but both are the result of biological preferences and drives.

The same applies to women. Prioritizing emotional intimacy and long-term partnership stability is one viable strategy. Prioritizing status and resources in a mate is another. Most people feel a mix of both drives, and both drives show up in the population because both can be adaptive depending on a wide range of circumstances.

And then there are sexual preferences and kinks—BDSM dynamics, dominance and submission, various fetishes—that are so common, show up so early in life, and appear so consistently across cultures that it's hard to explain them as purely learned. Something like 30-60% of people report fantasies involving power exchange. That's not a small deviant minority; that's a substantial chunk of the population. It's at least plausible that these preferences reflect underlying variation in evolved sexual psychology, even if we don't fully understand the mechanisms.

None of this means "it's natural, therefore it's the Only Proper Way" or "it's evolved, therefore it's set in stone." That's the move that gives evo-psych its bad name, and it's the move that Red Pill types exploit constantly. Humans are influenced by ideas, not just genes.  But understanding genetic drives means you're working with more accurate information about why our initial drives toward one behavior or another are so powerful.

Like all the previous sources of romantic and sexual tropes, evopsych research, particularly pop-evopsych, has its own incentives and potential distortions:

*   **Narrative satisfaction over rigor.** "Here's why men/women are like X" makes for a compelling story and sells books. Careful, hedged, probabilistic claims don't go viral.
*   **Confirmation bias in research focus.** Researchers are more likely to study (and publish) findings that confirm dominant cultural narratives. This isn't how science *should* be, but it is one of the unfortunate side effects of the pendulum over-swing.
*   ***Unfalsifiability*** **of many claims.** Post-hoc evolutionary explanations can be constructed for almost any observed behavior, which means the "explanation" often has no predictive power.

The progressive instinct to reject evo-psych entirely is understandable—it's been used to justify a lot of sexist nonsense. But leaving people with no framework for understanding the biological component of their sexuality doesn't protect them. It just leaves them confused when their desires don't match the blank-slate narrative, and vulnerable to worse frameworks that at least acknowledge or validate what they're experiencing.

So where does all this leave us?

The traditional sources from Part 1 are unreliable. The counterreactions—Blue, Red, and Black—each has their own incentives that lead to their own distortions. And even the scientific approach that could help is mostly encountered in pop-science form that's barely better than the ideological frameworks

If you're trying to actually understand how romance and attraction work, you can't just pick one of these and trust it. You have to do something harder: build your own map, piece by piece, from better sources and better conversations.

Building An Honest Map
======================

At the end of the day, the only way to really understand reality is to go out and observe it. And the only way to genuinely understand romance and sexuality is to talk to real people about their real experiences and preferences, and then, actually believe what they say, regardless of how strange it seems.

This maybe sounds obvious, but it's surprisingly rare. Most conversations about relationships are either abstract (debating theories and generalizations) or performative (presenting curated versions of our experiences). Actually sitting down with someone and saying "tell me honestly what you want, what you've experienced, what confused you"—*and creating the conditions where they can answer truthfully*—is hard, often for both the listener and the speaker... and that goes for both strangers and intimate friends or partners.

Nurturing a Truth-Telling Community
-----------------------------------

The prerequisite for good information is a social environment where honesty is actually possible. This doesn't happen by default. You have to build it, and protect it against erosion from status games or judgement.

**Start with yourself.** If you want others to be vulnerable and honest, you have to go first. Share your own confusions, your own embarrassing experiences, your own preferences that don't match the narratives. Vulnerability invites vulnerability.

**Make it safe to share uncomfortable truths.** The moment someone shares a preference or experience and gets judged for it, the honesty stops. This doesn't mean you have to approve of everything people *do*—but what people *want* or *feel* should always be recognized as valid first. Remember, the point of the community is to build mutual understanding. People can have their own opinions about what makes for a healthy relationship, or a stable society, or whatever. But there's nothing that kills collaborative inquiry faster than "you don't really feel that way" or "you're bad for feeling that way."

**Actively seek out different perspectives.** Talk to people of different genders, sexual orientations, experience levels, and relationship styles. Your male friends will give you one slice of reality; your female friends will give you another, your trans friends will get you even more, particularly if they've gone through hormone therapy and can report the differences they experienced after compared to before. No picture is complete on its own. People who've been married for twenty years know things that people in their twenties don't, and vice versa. People in non-traditional relationship structures have learned things that people in conventional ones haven't had to figure out. And *all* of it should be phrased as "my experience has been X," not "here is the truth that I know applies for everyone."

**Ask specific questions, not general ones.** "What do women want?" is an unanswerable question that invites generalizations. "What made you attracted to your last partner?" or "What's something you wish you'd known before your first relationship?" generates actual data. The more specific and personal the question, the more useful the answer.

**Notice the difference between stated and revealed preferences.** When someone tells you what they want, believe them—but also pay attention to their actual choices. People aren't always self-aware, and sometimes behavior tells you things that words don't. This isn't about catching people in lies; it's about building a fuller picture. Both what people say and what they do are data, and if you build a trusting relationship with people, you can gently bring up these apparent contradictions and explore them together.

**Treat information as probabilistic, not absolute.** When someone tells you their experience, that's one data point. When you notice a pattern across multiple people, that's worth more. But even strong patterns have exceptions. Stay curious about the outliers—they often teach you the most about the range of human experience.

The Conversations You're Not Having
-----------------------------------

How much does a women's weight matter for men's attraction to them, really?

How much does men's height matter for women? Or smell, for that matter?

There are conversations that almost never happen even among close friends, and it's one of the most valuable ones that people could be having right now if they tried: the post-mortem on attraction.

Most people, when they're attracted to someone, don't stop to analyze why. And most people, when they're not attracted to someone, don't explain it honestly—especially not to the person themselves. This means that most of us go through life with very little accurate feedback on what's actually generating (or killing) attraction.

If you can find friends who are willing to have this conversation—"here's what actually attracted me to that person, even though I know it sounds shallow" or "here's what turned me off, even though they seemed great on paper"—you'll learn more about how attraction actually works than years of theorizing.

This requires trust, safety, and a genuine commitment to honesty over comfort. It's uncomfortable to admit that you rejected someone because of something superficial. It's uncomfortable to admit that you were attracted to someone for reasons that don't fit your self-image, or what people around you might expect. But false models get built and maintained because so many things just go unsaid.

I run "Romantic Epistemology" events at various high-trust events because I want to encourage people to have these sorts of conversations. I try to ensure that people speak to their own experiences, rather than make statements about others, and encourage people to ask questions that might feel dumb or scary to ask elsewhere. People are often shocked by what others say, but there's genuine connection and gratitude too, particularly when someone shares something vulnerable that others weren't willing or able to voice for themselves.

No map you build alone will ever be as accurate as one that others help with, and this is particularly true in cases where territory is inside other people.

Some Good Sources
-----------------

All of this might sound daunting—building your own truth-seeking communities while navigating broken legacy sources and avoiding reactionary spin. But you're not starting from zero. There are people out there doing good epistemic work on romance and sexuality, and they can serve as models (and sources of useful information).

[**The Gottman Institute**](https://www.gottman.com/blog/) has been studying relationships for decades, and their work is notable for being genuinely empirical. John and Julie Gottman didn't start with a theory about what relationships *should* look like and then find evidence to support it. They brought couples into their lab, watched them interact, measured physiological responses, and then followed up years later to see who stayed together and who didn't. From that, they identified patterns—like the "Four Horsemen" (criticism, contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling) that predict divorce with remarkable accuracy, or the 5:1 ratio of positive to negative interactions in stable relationships.

What makes this valuable isn't just the specific findings, but the methodology. They asked "what actually predicts relationship success?" rather than "what should people do according to my moral framework?" That's a surprisingly rare approach.

[**Aella**](https://aella.substack.com/) comes from a completely different angle. She's a sex researcher and sex worker who runs large-scale surveys on sexual preferences, experiences, and behaviors—often asking questions that more institutional researchers won't touch. Her work is valuable for similar reasons: she's trying to map the territory as it actually is, not as people think it should be. When she asks thousands of people about their kinks, their relationship structures, their experiences with consent and communication, she's generating real data about human sexual diversity.

What these two have in common, despite their very different domains and methods, is a commitment to *finding out what's true* rather than *confirming specific narratives*. The Gottmans aren't trying to validate any particular relationship style; they're trying to figure out what works and what doesn't. Aella isn't trying to normalize or pathologize any particular kinks or romantic style; she's trying to understand the actual distribution of human sexuality.

There are plenty of personal blogs out there where people have shared their own experiences looking for love in an open way, like [Putanumonit](https://putanumonit.com/), or other sources of dating data, like the [old OKCupid research posts](https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/okcupid/index), but I'm not here to evaluate every single source out there and say which are good or bad; just point out that a difference exists, so that it's hopefully easier to notice it.

Good epistemic sources are curious, empirical, willing to report findings that might be uncomfortable or counterintuitive, and transparent about methodology and limitations. When you encounter someone talking about romance or sexuality, remind yourself: are they speaking for themselves, or others? If others, are they sharing data, or speaking anecdotally? If it's not direct observations of lots of people, or lots of people's self-reports, how applicable is it going to be to people with different genes, hormones, and brains?

Walk the Land
=============

You can't opt out of having a model of romance. You already have one. The question is whether you've ever examined where it came from, and whether those sources had any reason to give you accurate information.

Movies want to entertain you. Your family wants to protect you and pass on their values. Religion wants to stabilize society. Your friends want you to like and respect them. The Red Pill wants to sell you a solution. Progressive culture wants to signal its values.  
None of them are primarily trying to help you understand Truth™, in all its thorny and complicated and sometimes messy glory.

The epistemically honest path is uncomfortable: notice your assumptions, trace them back to their sources, hold them lightly, and update when reality contradicts them. Seek out the researchers who are actually trying to map the territory. Talk to real people, with real curiosity, and create the conditions for them to be honest with you. Listen more than you theorize. Accept that this is one of the domains where confident, generalizable knowledge is hardest to come by.

But always remember that you can't just think your way to understanding romance. Maps are useful, but at some point you have to walk the territory. That means trying things. Asking people out. Going on dates that might be awkward. Having relationships that might not work. Making mistakes, ideally ones you can learn from gracefully rather than ones that hurt people.

I opened by noting that young people today are dating less, reporting more loneliness, and turning to grifters for guidance. Better epistemics alone won't fix that. What fixes it is actually doing the thing—building real connections with real people, not just theorizing about how connections work. The map is not the territory, and no amount of reading about swimming teaches you to swim.

The good news is that truth and action reinforce each other. Accurate maps help you navigate, and navigation updates your maps. Each awkward date, each honest conversation, each relationship that works or doesn't—these are data points that let you refine your understanding in ways that no influencer or ideology ever could.  
Romance is one of the most important parts of most people's lives. It's also one of the areas where we do the least epistemics and take the fewest risks—where we inherit scripts without examination, stay passive to avoid rejection, and then wonder why we end up confused or lonely.

You can do better. But it requires intention, humility, a willingness to hear things you might not want to hear, and the courage to be vulnerable when sharing parts of yourself with others.

The territory is out there. Go walk it, and maybe share what you learn, now and then.