I feel the need to say that this is a superb comment -- perhaps the best I have seen on this topic.

I particularly appreciated the following passages:

Those rituals place a higher burden on the male for initiating things, and men don't have that stuff encoded in their DNA. It's something that the cooler kids learned in adolescence, and the less cool ones didn't.

(...)

there are a million more ways for the male to bungle than for the female to bungle it (again, women are more selective, and male behavior is a larger factor in female attraction than female behavior is in male attraction... just think about the ways women use words like "weird" or "creepy" in describing potential suitors),

(...)

Who is going to teach them all the dating rituals that they missed during adolescence, and give them back the self-confidence that they lost? Society isn't.

I would just add that this is one of those subjects on which people are particularly prone to other-optimizing.