Reddit mentions of From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America

Thats a bummer. Sorry about your friend. Those things sound convincing because they tell you that dating can be controlled with a little rationality.

Thing is, dating "rules" are just super variable. There will never be a universal guide because there's just too much variation by location, culture, and taste. Everything I've seen opposing this have been pseudo science. Sure, there are some assumptions that are safe bets, but there's just too many exceptions to every "rule" for them to be rules.

I really recommend the book From Front Porch to Back Seat. It wont give him a how-to guide, BUT it will knock down a bunch of Seduction Guide bullshit. Those seduction guides tend to frame their rules as based on "natural" and universal behavior between gender, usually rooted in some pseudo-science evolutionary psychology. This book will tell him how all those cultural conventions around dating that we think have always been there are actually very recent and therefore, unless human beings evolve like Pokemon, definitely are NOT coded by evolution into our DNA.

Dan Savage stuff also helped me out a lot when I first started dating, but honestly I haven't been following him for a while so I dont really know any particular link that would be most helpful.