Should you break up with your boyfriend? Is your wife toxic? Doesn’t your newborn seem a little co-dependent and guilty of just generally bringing a negative vibe to the house?
I hope, for your sake, that you’re not considering these questions simultaneously. But in any case, you have a few options as far as advice goes. You could talk to your mom, or a friend, or a priest. You could write to a chatbot like Grok or Claude or ChatGPT. Or you could visit Reddit’s r/relationship_advice. There, the conventional wisdom seems to be, “Dump him.”
Reddit user GeorgeDaGreat123 analyzed 15 years of comments on r/relationship_advice, sorting the subreddit’s advice into seven categories:
End Relationship (break up/divorce/cut contact)
Communicate
Give Space/Time
Set/Respect Boundaries
Seek Therapy/Counselling
Compromise
Other
“End Relationship” was always the most common response, sitting at just over 30% of answers in 2010. “End Relationship” comprised nearly 50% of answers in 2025.
“Set/Respect Boundaries” and “Seek Therapy/Counselling” have both become more common responses in the past fifteen years. “Give Space/Time,” “Communicate,” and
“Compromise” have all collapsed in popularity.
How should we interpret this data?
1. Negative Posts Get More Attention
R/relationship_advice had 6,838 readers in 2010, according to a snapshot from the Wayback Machine. The subreddit had 55,498 readers in March 2013, and 1.2 million users by February 2019.
R/relationship_advice has 2.2 million weekly visitors and 69,000 weekly contributions as of March 2026. More readers means more problems, but more importantly, it means more advice. The most salacious problems are likely to get the most attention, and the most comments saying some variety of: “Girl. RUN.”
GeorgeDaGreat123 says his dataset contains all 5 million posts and 52 million comments from r/relationship_advice. It’s fair to assume that those comments are not equally distributed.
Out of curiosity, I visited r/relationship_advice and sorted by “best.” A selection of my favorite titles follows.
“She [F25] withdrew consent after the act, how do I [M26] move on from this?”
“I Genially Think My (35F) Husband (36M) is a Psychopath”
“I (F24) broke up with my bf (M29) over him wearing a condom”
Last, but certainly not least: “My husband 36M poops too much for me 36F to feel comfortable having another baby with him[.]”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to State of the Day to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.