I don’t really believe in rules, but I do like old-fashioned dating where you don’t call the guy until he calls you. I don’t think it’s like he’s got to do this and that’s the rule.

Tisdale frames herself as skeptical of rigid “dating rules” while still expressing a preference for a traditional courtship script in which the man initiates contact. The quote captures a common early-2000s tension between a rhetoric of independence (“I don’t believe in rules”) and lingering norms about gendered pursuit and restraint. Her clarification—she doesn’t see it as an obligation—suggests she treats the convention less as a moral requirement than as a personal comfort zone that signals interest and effort. Read this way, the remark is less prescriptive advice than a snapshot of how popular culture often negotiates romance: rejecting dogma while selectively keeping rituals that feel reassuring or romantic.