Love is a battlefield, as anyone who has ever spent any significant time on dating apps can attest. Most of us will have been in the trenches, unless we found “The One” in high school. Even then, the course of true love rarely runs smooth.

So we turn to friends, Netflix rom-coms and dating experts for guidance. And while our mates may not be the most objective or tight-lipped, and To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before probably not the place for serious guidance, the advice columnist promises real talk, discretion assured.

Such was the comfort Mr John Dunton craved when, in 1690, in the midst of an extra-marital affair, he wished for someone to advise him upon it. He set up The Athenian Mercury, a London publication dedicated to expert advice on matters of the heart and mind. The ensuing first officially recorded advice column promised to answer “all nice and curious questions”.

As time has gone on, the questions have become franker, if no less curious. These days, an advice columnist such as Ms Mariella Frostrup, one of the longest serving and best known in the UK, can expect to field questions about fidelity, faking orgasms and best-friend drunken sex. “Opening my mailbox is a constant source of shock,” Ms Frostrup says. “But the real surprise is that there is no end to the different forms of human experience and and relationships. So, claiming any great wisdom would be a mistake.”

But it’s wisdom we want. The enduring popularity of the expert columnist suggests that we are not done with looking to other humans for advice. It is in that spirit, a mix of curiosity and neediness, MR PORTER has gathered the thoughts of Ms Frostrup, dating blogger and author Mr Justin Myers and Cosmopolitan’s Mr Logan Hill, to hear what intelligence they’ve gleaned from the battlegrounds for our hearts.

What they share can be disquieting for anyone considering reinstalling Tinder ahead of Valentine’s Day. “I learnt that it’s fucking chaos out there,’ says Mr Hill, whose dating column, “Ask Him Anything”, ran in Cosmopolitan magazine in the US for five years. “There really are no rules, except what the algorithm defines, and so many people show up to first dates with completely different assumptions and fears.”

We can lay some blame for modern dating’s hardships on the etiquette-free zone of the apps, but we must, say the experts, accept our part in making courtship so challenging. “Most of the time, we have no idea whatsoever what someone else is thinking or feeling, even when they tell us,” says Mr Myers, who is based in London. “They’re playing a part or sparing our feelings or, in some cases, trying to wound us. Our inability to grasp this and control or decipher the emotions of others is what drives us mad. Perhaps if we learn to accept there will be unknowables, we’d have an easier time of it. But also, perhaps not.”

Like many modern dating experts, Mr Myers’ expertise comes from active duty in the field. He’s blogged about his dates (“One of the few downsides of being gay is that you are expected to date other men”), wrote a novel about serial dating, The Last Romeo, and gained a readership for his salty reviews of The Guardian newspaper’s weekly “Blind Date” column, in which the dates report back from their encounter. Reading between the lines of other people’s responses, Mr Myers has come to some conclusions about how we operate on first dates. Women tend to think they talk too much, he believes. Men? Not so much.

“Men don’t tend to worry that they talk too much, but, whether on dates with men or women, seem reluctant to show how keen they are,” says Mr Myers. “It’s about face-saving and perhaps an outdated view that men can’t show excitement about romantic matters. What I’ve also learnt is that once people – men or women – stop trying to control that first impression, the dates go really well. A proper coup de foudre has absolutely no interest in the good impression you’re trying to make.”

Love at first sight may be a romantic notion, but the dating experts warn against such unrealistic #couplesgoals. “People have enormously high expectations of romantic relationships,” says Ms Frostrup. “They believe that, for the entire duration of a relationship, you can keep it frozen. That seven years down the line, you should still send kisses by text to indicate that romance is still alive. We need to understand that relationships evolve. There’ll be times where you can barely stand the sight of each other.”

In 20 years of writing her “Dear Mariella” column in The Observer, Ms Frostrup has developed a direct approach to relationship advice. Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that what she’s learnt most about our romantic entanglements concerns their endings. “We’ve got to get better at splitting up,” she says. “If we’re going to do it as often as we do, we have to not treat it like it’s World War III. We have to understand, going into a relationship, that one of you might be unfaithful, or run away or become bored or dissatisfied.”

If you’d like to avoid that scenario, the dating experts advise you do the hard thing: talk about your relationship with your significant other. Mr Hill took this a step further during his tenure as an advice columnist when he began discussing other people’s problems with his date at the time, Erica. “We would talk through my readers’ question and, through that process, we got to know each other faster and more intimately than we ever would have otherwise,” says Mr Hill. “My readers’ honesty inspired us to be shockingly honest about everything – exes, sex, family, hopes, regrets. It helped me build the strongest relationship of my life.”

Reader, he married Erica, four years later, thereby proving that advice columnists have the potential to learn about themselves in the course of their work.

Mr Myers’ commentary on other people’s blind dates taught him not to be such a snark about romance. “I went to the wedding of a couple whose date I reviewed, and it was so perfect,” he says. “They’re literally two halves who’d been waiting for each other all this time. I was surprised not to find this saccharine, but very genuine and encouraging. I didn’t realise I had a romantic side. I thought I was ice all the way to the bone.”

To grow, to evolve – these are the things we look to the advice columnists for. There must be pressure for them to do the same. Do they feel like they must be good at relationships in order to help others with theirs?

“Oh no, I’m a total hypocrite,” says Ms Frostrup. “We all tell our friends what they should do, but when it comes to our own lives, it’s so much harder to behave well. It’s always so easy to dispense advice. That’s what we all do.”