Gen Z rely on friends for dating advice, but that’s a mistake

We all like to think our best friend knows what’s best for us. But it turns out that isn’t the case.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that any message you send or receive when you start kind of liking someone has been read, tweaked and judged heavily by the group chat.

If you’ve ever stopped to wonder if your friends are actually the best people to be handing out dating advice when they’re actually as hopeless as you are — the answer is probably not.

According to new research from Hinge, a huge 86 per cent of Gen Z singles know this, admitting to having questioned their friend’s dating advice. Which isn’t surprising, considering over half also said the person they went to for dating advice wasn’t someone currently in a healthy relationship.

80% of Gen Z Hinge singles say it's important to get their friends' advice on who to date.

Now, to be fair, I’ve 100 per cent learned more about healthy relationships from being in truly terrible ones. And now I’ve started dating wonderful men, I’ve discovered it’s far better to have definite “must nots” over definite “must haves”, so asking your single friends isn’t always a bad idea.

On the flip side, you should also note that the stats said “healthy” relationship, because sorry but there’s a lot of couples out there who just shouldn’t be.

Now I thought this group chat dating system was bad for me, a Millennial, but apparently Gen Z rely even more heavily on their friends to veto their dates than we did. In fact, 80 per cent of Gen Z believe it’s important to get your friends’ advice on your dates, and you’re 30 per cent more likely than Millennials to feel stressed out by making dating choices without the input of their mates.

84% of Gen Z Hinge singles admit they’ll hide some details when asking their friends for dating advice.

This is despite the fact that 85 per cent of Gen Z singles admit they don’t tell their friends the whole story when asking for advice, and over half of you don’t tell the whole truth to your friends who want dating advice from you. It’s an extremely unhelpful cycle.

So, what can you do about it?

First of all, if there is one hard-learned wisdom that I can depart, it’s that the biggest red flag you can show to yourself is not wanting to be honest with your friends about the person you’re dating.

If you know there’s a problem you want to talk out with your mates, but you can’t bring yourself to share all the facts — it’s 100 per cent because you already know it’s not OK, but you’re not willing to admit it.

On the flip side, if you’re dating someone who doesn’t throw up emotional roller-coasters that you desperately need to dissect with your friends, you’re probably on to a winner.

Secondly, if you’re finding yourself repeating unhelpful patterns in your dating life — aka if you’ve ever uttered a sentence similar to “why does this always happen to me?” — your friends probably can’t help, but therapy sure can. Please go to it, you’ll be much happier.

50 per cent of Gen Z singles admit they’re not always honest when they gave dating advice to their friends, usually to save their feelings.

Finally, I’m still a firm believer in talking things through with your friends, but be careful about the friends you choose to lean on.

I’m lucky enough to have a handful of friends that I absolutely trust to reflect my behaviour back to me honestly — that’s whether I’m right or wrong. And they’ve been doing so for decades now.

Notice I said they reflect my behaviour back to me, not that they assess the behaviour of the person I’m dating. The fact is, we all have different things we’re attracted to, and different behaviours we’re willing to deal with — so your friends can’t really comment on your romance.

But, they should know you very well, and they can tell if you’re actually happy, or just faking it.