Are You Actually Ready for Love? Your Friends Know the Answer

Wednesday, February 19, 2025.

Love is a battlefield, but before you even get to the trenches, there’s a bigger question: Are you ready for a serious relationship?

If you think the answer lies deep in your attachment style, the latest research suggests you might want to reconsider.

According to a new study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (Yang et al., 2024), your friends—yes, those meddling, opinionated, and brutally honest people—might actually be better at assessing your commitment readiness than you are.

Even more intriguing?

While Attachment Theory still dominates pop-psychology discourse, newer models of relationship psychology suggest our ability to commit isn’t as neatly dictated by childhood experiences as once thought.

Friends: The Unpaid Relationship Experts in Your Life

Science has long confirmed what we already suspect—our friends are heavily involved in our love lives. They introduce us to potential partners, warn us when we’re dating red flags wrapped in human form, and patiently listen to our over-analysis of text messages (Fehr, 2008).

But can they actually predict our relationship readiness?

A team of researchers at Michigan State University wanted to find out. They recruited 772 young adults (mostly women, average age 19) and placed them into groups of four friends. Each participant rated themselves and their three friends on two things:

✔ Commitment Readiness – How prepared they seemed for a long-term relationship.
✔ Attachment Style – Whether they leaned Anxious, Avoidant, or Secure in relationships.

The results? Friends largely agreed on who was ready to commit and who was not.

The takeaway? Your best friend might know you better than an internet quiz about attachment styles.

Attachment Theory: The Oversimplified Blueprint for Love?

For decades, Attachment Theory—pioneered by Bowlby (1969) and later refined by Ainsworth (1978)—has been the go-to framework for understanding romantic relationships. But modern relationship science is increasingly skeptical of how much attachment style actually determines commitment readiness.

Here’s why:

• Attachment Is Not a Fixed Label.
  Studies show that attachment can change over time based on life experiences, therapy, and the quality of one’s relationships (Fraley, 2019). You might be avoidant in one relationship but securely attached in another.

• Situational Factors Matter More Than We Think.
  Modern relationship researchers argue that commitment readiness is fluid, influenced more by personal circumstances, cultural expectations, and emotional maturity than by whether your parents were emotionally available when you were six (Overall et al., 2022).

• Attachment Styles Are Often Self-Fulfilling Prophecies.
  People who believe they have an insecure attachment style might unconsciously act in ways that confirm it (Hudson et al., 2020). If you tell yourself, I have an anxious attachment, I always push people away, guess what? You probably will.

  The Real Reasons Friends Think You’re Not Ready for Love

  In this study, participants with higher Anxious or Avoidant attachment styles were consistently rated as “not ready for commitment” by their friends. But before you chalk this up to Attachment Theory being infallible, consider alternative explanations:

✔ Behavioral Patterns – If you constantly complain about dating but fear commitment, your friends don’t need a psych degree to see a pattern.
✔ Verbal Cues – People reveal a lot about their commitment fears in casual conversation. (“I hate labels,” “I get bored in relationships,” or “Marriage is just a tax break.”)
✔ Social Perception – Friends might simply be reflecting how you present yourself—not some deep-seated childhood trauma.

It’s not that attachment styles are meaningless; it’s that they don’t operate in a vacuum. You can have avoidant tendencies and still build a successful relationship. Likewise, you can be “securely attached” and still make terrible dating choices.

Are You Actually Good at Judging Your Own Readiness for Commitment?

A particularly interesting finding? People who believed they were ready for love also assumed their friends were ready.

Psychologists call this assumed similarity bias, which is a fancy way of saying, If I think I’m emotionally evolved, my friends must be too!

But self-perception is notoriously unreliable. Many people believe they’re ready for love, only to panic at the first sign of emotional vulnerability. Others think they’re not ready but stumble into fulfilling relationships anyway.

In other words, the real problem isn’t whether your attachment style is “secure” or “insecure.” It’s whether you’re self-aware enough to recognize your own relationship blind spots.

How to Actually Know If You’re Ready for Love

Rather than relying on outdated attachment models or biased self-perception, try this instead:

✔ Ask Your Closest Friends. If three people independently tell you the same thing (“Maybe you need to work on yourself first”), take that as a sign.
✔ Look at Your Relationship Patterns. Do you repeatedly end things at the same stage? Do you run when things get serious? That’s more telling than an attachment quiz. Let’s just think of those as fun, not science.
✔ Consider Situational Readiness. Your attachment style might not matter if you’re emotionally drained from work, moving across the country, or still healing from a past relationship.

What This Study Leaves Unanswered

Like all research, this study has its limitations.

• It only looked at young adults, (or I as prefer to look at it, elderly children). Are friends just as accurate for people in their 30s and 40s? Would older adults have more self-awareness?

• It was a cross-sectional study. We don’t know whether these friends’ perceptions actually predict long-term relationship outcomes.

• It didn’t examine other social influences. How do family, coworkers, or exes compare in assessing relationship readiness?

Future research should track people over time to see if their friends’ predictions hold up. Do those rated as “ready for commitment” actually have longer, healthier relationships? Or is readiness more unpredictable than we think?

Final Thoughts: Maybe Your Friends Are Your Best Love Gurus

If this study tells us anything, it’s that your friends probably know you better than attachment theory does.

Your attachment style might shape how you approach relationships, but it doesn’t determine your fate.

The real key to commitment readiness is self-awareness, emotional maturity, and the ability to grow.

And if your best friend tells you that you’re definitely not ready for love?

Maybe listen. Or at least buy them a coffee before they crush your romantic aspirations.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. Basic Books.

Fehr, B. (2008). Friendship processes. Sage.

Fraley, R. C. (2019). Attachment stability from infancy to adulthood: Meta-analytic evidence for a relational constructrather than a fixed trait. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 117(4), 758–781.

Hudson, N. W., Fraley, R. C., Chopik, W. J., & Heffernan, M. E. (2020). Not all insecure attachment styles are created equal: Stability, change, and implications for relationships. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 46(7), 1030–1044.

Overall, N. C., Simpson, J. A., & Fletcher, G. J. (2022). The changing landscape of adult attachment: Beyond attachment security and insecurity. Annual Review of Psychology, 73, 97–123.

Yang, H., Weidmann, R., Purol, M. F., Ackerman, R. A., Lucas, R. E., & Chopik, W. J. (2024). Ready (for love) or not? Self and other perceptions of commitment readiness and associations with attachment orientations. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.