A comedic, self-aware field manual in which our narrator reveals, at great personal risk, the forbidden arts of showering, asking questions, and texting back. For entertainment only, though he is quietly horrified to admit the tactics all work because they are just decency in a trench coat.
5 chapters · 17 rules
This is a tongue-in-cheek playbook by T. Whitlock, a man who has convinced himself that being pleasant is an elite covert strategy, and who narrates ordinary kindness as though smuggling state secrets. The joke is entirely on him. Underneath every ridiculous flourish is advice that is genuinely warm and worth taking: be honest, be curious, listen more than you perform, respect a no, and become someone actually worth meeting. Read it for the laughs, then keep the parts that are secretly sincere, which is all of them.
For anyone stepping back into dating who would like to feel a little less doomed and a little more amused about it, and who suspects that the whole enterprise is simpler and kinder than the internet insists. It suits the nervous, the overthinkers, the recently single, and anyone who has ever drafted a text seven times before sending 'haha yeah.' No prior charisma required.
Initial publication — five chapters of allegedly forbidden tactics that are, on closer inspection, simply how to be a decent person on a date. For entertainment, and also, quietly, for real.