The internet is toxic to men and women looking for love

If you spend a lot of time on the internet, you’ve probably been bombarded with relationship-focused content that always trends toward nihilism.

If it’s not a guy trying to convince you that women are financial leeches, it’s a woman smiling through her teeth as she tells you being lonely is better than trusting a man ever again.

Whatever flavor of relationship pain you’re experiencing, you can consume a plethora of poisonous rhetoric, and you will develop an addiction to blaming everyone else for you lacking in the love department.

Americans were promised the internet, in combination with social media, would make us feel more connected, yet we’re plagued with loneliness.

Our tech overlords created an algorithmic best friend to deliver more of what we like, but too often it’s just designed to keep us stagnant, resentful and hopeless.

People who are hurt search the web to figure out if they’re the only ones who are wounded.

But instead of discovering people who’ve crossed the bridge into healing, influencers introduce them to content designed to extract hope and inject animosity for the opposite sex.

We have a system driven on telling men and women we cannot get along and wanting love from each other is either foolish or impossible.

I’ve consumed content that persuades lost young men to believe all women are sociopaths and the only way to win is to out-sociopath them by extracting sex from them before getting emotionally attached.

“All women are sex workers. Sex for pay. Most just have one customer called a boyfriend,” says internet pimp Andrew Tate.

Coincidentally, there’s content targeting struggling women with similar advice: use sex as a tool to extract money from men and discard them when they’re no longer resourceful.

“All men cheat, never love a man, take their money and leave” is how one critic describes popular YouTuber SheraSeven’s philosophy.

The commonality between both recommendations is neither is healthy — and they’re advocating both sexes be emotionally avoidant, manipulative and give up on finding love.

As a married man, I could not imagine my life without my wife. My entire writing career might not even have happened without the support and sacrifices made by my lovely wife, Michele.

What I have with her is a friendship built on trust and respect, and I know that if the outside world is chaotic, inside my home with my wife is always safe and peaceful.

There is an absence of content focused on being realistic about relationships, where we aren’t teaching blind optimism but simultaneously not accepting hopelessness as a strategy.

Hope is what tethers us to life as it pulls us away from despair. Without hope, why bother going on another date or healing from your past traumas?

The consumers of this content are stuck in a harmful feedback loop that only reflects their current situation. They are just as lost as the first day they searched for why they’re struggling.

The core reason dating is so horrendous is we’ve accepted dating complete strangers as an effective strategy to discover love. Decades ago, people had smaller social circles that intertwined with their community.

There was likely someone who knew the person you were open to dating and vouched for the character of this individual.

When you date a stranger from the internet no one in your life knows, you’re entering situations blind to that person’s intent, history and personality. Worse, you’re encountering people who will pay no tangible social repercussions for mistreating you.

My wife is the sister of a former co-worker I was friends with and spent time with his family. When we decided to date, she could ask her family about my true character and feel safe about exploring a relationship and being vulnerable with me.

Likewise, I would have suffered a social penalty for ghosting her or mistreating her, a penalty that doesn’t exist when you date someone you don’t know with an attractive online profile.

There are no guarantees for finding love, but the strategy of dating strangers is sure to increase dramatically the likelihood of failure, and the more times you suffer from heartbreak, the more you’ll believe it’s impossible to find the same love I have with my wife.

If you want better outcomes, go outside, increase your social circle, and inquire about potential matches.

Never accept advice from miserable and wounded people about how to better your life — and that’s the most prevalent personality types in the influencer-relationship economy.

If their strategy is for you to avoid participating instead of teaching you the appropriate treatment to accept from a future partner, then understand they’re preaching stagnation for money.

You have no control over what other people do, but you have full control over how you respond to life’s disappointments.

What these influencers never tell people is that the type of person they’ve been getting is the exact person they’ve attracted and accepted.

If you improve yourself, you’ll get a better-quality partner; that’s what I did before I encountered my wife, and I’ve only grown since.

You cannot experience genuine love if you’re not willing to be vulnerable.

Adam B. Coleman is the author of “The Children We Left Behind” and founder of Wrong Speak Publishing.