£10,000 can buy you domestic bliss. Credit: GraphicaArtis/Getty Images

There’s a formula to successful self-help: it has to sound simple enough to be accessible, but complex enough that you need to buy the book or pay for the classes. And the 1990s dating bible The Rules was successful: it sold 2 million copies in its heyday, and was translated into 27 languages.
Its tone was that of a short, sharp, necessary telling off for lovelorn American women: you may have lost your way, it said, but we can get you back on track. And the reason women had fallen from the path to true romance? Feminism. Feminism, which was supposedly telling women they didn’t need a man, even though many women very much wanted to make a life with one. Feminism, which had separated women from the old wisdom of the chase.
Was feminism really so strong at this time? The proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the US constitution had been dead for more than a decade at this point, so possibly not, but facts never tended to trouble the narrative. You might need to be assertive at the office, but when it came to romance, the book was clear: only by playing the passive, feminine role could women make the right match.
Authors Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider were uncompromising in their instructions. Their method worked, they said, but only if you followed every detail. That included: “don’t talk to a man first”, “don’t rush into sex”, “let him take the lead” and “don’t expect a man to change”. In the worldview of The Rules, all feminism’s successes had left women lonely. “We didn’t want to give up our liberation,” wrote Fein and Schneider, “but neither did we want to come home to empty apartments. Why couldn’t we have it all?”
Of course, when I say The Rules was successful, I mean that in the commercial sense. A cynic might point out that if self-help was successful in bringing out all the personal improvements it promised, its vendors would rapidly go out of business. And yet, the market is still going strong, with new purveyors rising up to solve the same old problems.
Today, feminism isn’t just failing to progress — with Roe vs Wade in danger of imminent collapse in the US, and sexual equality law in the UK threatened by the dissolution of the very concept of sex, it seems to be in retreat. And yet, it’s still getting the blame from a new generation of relationship gurus who want women to reclaim their “feminine energy”.
If you’re a straight woman who feels like you’re caught in a romance dead-end, never able to get a man to actually commit, the problem might just be you. This is the argument of “femininity coaches” Persia Lawson and Sami Wunder, who were both recently profiled in the Daily Mail. Women, they argue, are bringing the macho values of the workplace to the bedroom, and they’re paying for it with loneliness.
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