In the modern world, where everyone is drenched with self-help tapes, television gurus, and constant advertising messages which promise easy answers to every lifestyle problem from being broke to being single, it is easy to believe that popular dating books hold the key to a successful relationship. Dating books are a huge market, and a lot of people are making a lot of money writing, publishing, marketing, and selling books on dating, because a lot of people are buying books on dating.
However, different dating books provide a lot of different answers to the same questions, which can make it difficult to navigate through the sea of books on dating. Plus, there is no way to be sure that dating books actually work. How much more than non-book readers do people who read these books date? When people who read these books date, do they really find happiness before the rest of us? Nobody knows if reading dating books helps or hurts a single person's chances of finding lasting love. The only thing that we can be sure of about dating books is that their readers want to know what makes relationships work, and what doesn't.
This curiosity, which all readers of dating books share, can be extremely healthy, and looking for answers about the nature of relationships can prove to be highly beneficial to those readers' current or future partners. Books on dating can be valuable tools for anyone to start thinking about how to build relationships, and they can help a single person or a couple discover their deepest beliefs about themselves and other people. The kind of introspection which dating books can inspire in their readers often leads to a deep level of self-knowledge. This self-knowledge can in turn allow people to build stronger, more realistic bonds and to be more openly communicative with their partners. Dating books can be very helpful, because they can be a catalyst for the reader to explore the issues which they discuss.
However, some dating books discourage their readers from asking deep questions about the nature of love and instead offer easy answers, proffering "ten top tips to hook a lover in just two days" or other such wild promises. These dating books can hinder a real relationship, as the manipulative games which they suggest that women and men should play with each other can often stand between two people who would be perfect for each other if they were able to relax and connect honestly as themselves. Books on dating can actually drive people apart.
The key to getting the most use out of dating books is to read them critically. By taking all the authors' various kinds of advice with a grain of salt, a reader can protect their relationship from the bad books and still benefit from the good ones. The power to benefit from books on dating lies within the reader, and with how the reader decides to use the information these books provide.
Readers of books on dating would do well to remember that the advice given in dating books can be read as a series of suggestions, and as a list of possibilities, rather than as a series of commands and as a list of facts.