
The excellent new Sundance documentary The Dating Game asks a question that is both comedic and sad: Can the tactics of pickup artists jump-start a country’s birthrate?
The film, from director Violet Du Feng, focuses on the dating crisis in China, a country where, because of the now-abandoned one-child policy, men outnumber women by 30 million. That leaves working-class young men scrambling to impress the few available women, and turning to games and misrepresentations that one character in the film describes as “greasy.”
The techniques are explained in the doc by Hao, one of China’s most sought-after dating coaches, who we follow as he advises three bachelors — Zhou, Li, and Wu — on how to attract women. Besides dressing his boys like K-Pop stars, he teaches them tactics like “push-pull,” wherein a man simultaneously compliments and insults a prospective partner, so that she’ll seek his approval. (A push-pull line goes something like, “You are very pretty for someone with your head shape.”)
Hao also recommends abruptly cutting off text conversations just as they’re getting deep, to see how the woman will respond — and to make the bachelor seem more elusive, and allegedly more interesting.
These techniques may sound familiar to anyone who has read Neil Strauss’ tremendously entertaining book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, in which Strauss, who repeatedly describes himself as average-looking, draws the interest of beautiful women though tactics like “negging” (basically “push-pull”) and opening a set (entering a new group) while ignoring the most attractive woman in it, in order to make her wonder why you aren’t interested.
The Dating Game and China’s Falling Birthrate
The Dating Game is fascinating on many levels. There’s inherent, universal awkwardness and tension in dating, and in this case the stakes are incredibly high: The film uses the dating crisis to explain how China’s one-child policy led to its falling birthrate.
The country limited families to one child from 1979 to 2015, and sons were so preferred over daughters that many girls were put up for adoption or simply abandoned. In the film’s darkest moment, one bachelor recalls seeing, as a boy, baby girls left out to die.
Additionally, many parents went to work in cities, leaving their children in the poor countryside to be raised by grandparents.
A bachelor poetically laments, “This whole generation grew up without love.”
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There’s a perception among many lonely bachelors, both in China and the United States, that women prefer jerks. Some men labor under the perception that women don’t like them because they just seem to nice, and lament being “friend-zoned.” Lacking real confidence, they overcompensate with fake swagger and mind games.
Without overgeneralizing, The Dating Game nicely encapsulates the debate about what women want through anecdote. Hao’s greatest success, as a young man who grew up in a poor, rural village, was winning over his wife, Wen, a stylish, attractive, well-educated woman from the city. She is his proof that his games work.
But there’s a catch: Wen insists that she married him in spite of his pickup-artist tactics, not because of them. She’s the voice of reason who uses the perfect adjective “greasy” to describe his approaches. Wen insists that she saw through them, and further explains, in no uncertain terms, that his attempts to control her are hurting their marriage.
Wen, in a delightful twist, is also a dating coach, and she recommends open communication and honesty, not games.
The film also looks at both very old-fashioned and very new methods of trying to jump-start marriage and children: Elders will pack public parks every weekend to try matchmaking their children, while some women have checked out on the whole concept of finding a real man.
In a short segment that could yield an entirely separate documentary, The Dating Game profiles a woman who has opted for a virtual boyfriend. He has no money and can’t make physical contact, but he looks just like those K-Pop stars and always says the right things.
It’s a segment of the film that feels especially timely, in the time of DeepSeek, and of course virtual boyfriends and girlfriends aren’t a uniquely Chinese phenomenon. (See also the terrific New York Times piece “She Is In Love With ChatGPT.“) The new Hollywood sci-fi thriller Companion is about a young man (Jack Quaid) who brings his robot girlfriend (Sophie Thatcher) on a weekend getaway.
It’s easy to wonder if there’s any hope for humanity. And if so, does it lie with push-pull, or long walks on the beach?
The Dating Game is now screening at Sundance.
Main image: A still from The Dating Game by Violet Du Feng, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute. Photo by Wei Gao.