Are You Actually Ready for Love? Your Friends Know the Answer
Wednesday, February 19, 2025. Revised Friday, December 26, 2025.
Love may be a battlefield—but before you even lace up your boots, there’s a quieter, more consequential question:
Are you actually ready for a serious relationship?
If you assume the answer lives somewhere deep inside your attachment style, the latest research suggests you may want to broaden the inquiry. According to a recent study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships (Yang et al., 2024), your friends—those observant, occasionally annoying, and surprisingly accurate witnesses to your life—may be better judges of your commitment readiness than you are.
More interesting still: while attachment theory continues to dominate pop-psychology, newer relationship research suggests that readiness for commitment is far less about childhood imprinting than we’ve been led to believe.
Friends: The Unpaid Relationship Experts in Your Life
We already know friends play a starring role in our romantic lives. They introduce us to potential partners, issue warnings when someone is clearly a red flag in human form, and listen patiently as we dissect text messages like Cold War intelligence (Fehr, 2008).
But can they actually predict whether we’re ready for commitment?
To test this, researchers recruited 772 young adults (average age 19) and placed them into groups of four friends. Each participant rated themselves—and each of their friends—on two dimensions:
Commitment readiness: How prepared someone seemed for a long-term relationship
Attachment orientation: Anxious, avoidant, or secure
The striking result: friends showed strong agreement with one another about who was ready for commitment and who was not.
Translation: your best friend may have more insight than your favorite attachment quiz.
Attachment Theory: Useful, but Not the Whole Story
Attachment theory, originating with Bowlby and later refined by Ainsworth, has offered an enormously helpful framework for understanding intimacy. But modern researchers are increasingly cautious about how far it can be stretched.
Here’s why.
Attachment is not a fixed trait.
Longitudinal research shows that attachment orientations shift over time in response to life events, therapy, and the quality of relationships themselves. People are not permanently stamped “avoidant” or “anxious” at age six (Fraley, 2019).
Situational factors matter more than we admit.
Commitment readiness fluctuates with stress, burnout, grief, career upheaval, and cultural expectations. Being emotionally unavailable at one moment does not mean being structurally incapable of intimacy (Overall et al., 2022).
Labels can become self-fulfilling.
People who strongly identify with an “insecure” attachment label may unconsciously behave in ways that reinforce it. If you narrate yourself as someone who always sabotages closeness, you are more likely to do exactly that (Hudson et al., 2020).
Attachment theory explains patterns. It does not always predict readiness.
Why Friends Think You’re Not Ready (Even If You Think You Are)
In the study, individuals higher in anxious or avoidant attachment were more likely to be rated by friends as “not ready for commitment.” But this doesn’t necessarily mean friends were detecting attachment trauma.
They were likely noticing behavior.
Repeated patterns: cycling through short relationships, ambivalence about commitment, chronic dissatisfaction
Verbal tells: “I hate labels,” “I get bored easily,” “Marriage is just paperwork”
Presentation: how someone talks about partners, vulnerability, and future plans
Friends are responding to what you do and say, not your attachment backstory.
And importantly: having avoidant or anxious tendencies does not doom anyone to relational failure. Likewise, being “secure” does not prevent bad judgment.
Are You Any Good at Judging Your Own Readiness?
One of the most revealing findings in the study was a cognitive bias: people who believed they were ready for love also assumed their friends were ready.
Psychologists call this assumed similarity bias—the tendency to project our self-assessment onto others.
Unfortunately, self-perception is famously unreliable in relationships. Many people feel ready until intimacy arrives. Others assume they’re not ready and then surprise themselves entirely.
The problem is not attachment style. It’s blind spots.
How to Actually Assess Your Readiness for Love
Instead of over-relying on labels or self-diagnosis, consider these more reliable indicators:
Ask your closest friends. If multiple people independently raise the same concern, it’s data—not an insult.
Examine your patterns. Do relationships end at the same stage? Do you disengage when things deepen? That tells you more than a quiz ever will.
Account for context. Emotional exhaustion, relocation, unresolved grief, or recent heartbreak can all mimic “avoidant attachment.”
Readiness is not a personality trait. It’s a condition.
What This Study Can’t Tell Us (Yet)
The research is not without limits.
The sample was young. Whether friend accuracy holds in later adulthood remains unknown.
The study was cross-sectional. We don’t yet know if friend perceptions predict long-term outcomes.
Other social observers—family, coworkers, ex-partners—weren’t included.
Future research may reveal whether friends’ judgments forecast relationship longevity or simply capture present-moment readiness.
Final Thoughts: Your Friends Might Be Your Best Love Mirrors
If this research tells us anything, it’s that readiness for love is often more visible from the outside than the inside.
Attachment shapes how we connect—but it does not dictate our destiny.
Self-awareness, emotional capacity, and willingness to grow matter more than labels ever could.
And if your best friend gently suggests you’re not ready?
You might consider listening.
Or at least buy them a coffee first.
Be Well. Stay Kind. Godspeed.