Breakup Advice

I’ve often heard people wonder why the person who they get the best relationship advice from is single. After all, if this person understands relationships so well, why aren’t they successfully having one?

It may sound logical that anyone who understands relationships well would be currently living out that understanding with a partner. But when you think about it more deeply, you realize that there are actually many reasons why a person, despite being single at the time, may offer a wealth of valuable insight to those dealing with a boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse or a breakup.

This isn’t to say that all single people offer great advice. Some really are single due to having poor understanding of relationships. Others are single for different reasons, but just happen not to be wise in this area. Also, there are plenty of people who have great relationships but, if asked how or why, wouldn’t be able to articulate it to anyone else.

Below are some reasons that great relationship advice can come from someone who is single:

• Teaching and doing involve different skills – There are some great coaches in sports that aren’t actually great at playing that sport. The necessary abilities are different. Someone can have a great mind for strategy, but simply not be strong enough physically to enact it themselves, for example. There have been some great NBA coaches who were very small physically. They could never have made it in the NBA as players, but do a very good job as analysts and strategists. The same logic can apply to relationships.
• Being single can allow for distance and objectivity – Sometimes when a person is not with a partner at the moment, they have an ability to see things more clearly since they are outside the dynamics of relationships looking in. This could especially be true if they’ve been in relationships before and now have experience from the inside and from the outside afterward, as well. They have now seen a relationship through all steps of the process from being single to courting to partnership to breaking up to being single again. This can allow them to have more knowledge than someone might have that has only been in a relationship and not yet gone through a breakup, for example.
• Sometimes being single is evidence of relationship wisdom – There are plenty of times in life when the wise choice is to be single, at least for some period of time. Someone who constantly jumps into relationships or stays in a relationship that is unhealthy may not be single, but that doesn’t mean that they are making wise choices or know more about relationships than the single person. If a person is single for the wrong reasons or because they are making misguided choices, then this might be a sign that they are a poor person to take advice from. But many people are single for all the right reasons.

• Singlehood may be wise for one person, while a relationship may be wise for another – Building on the previous point, everyone’s situation is different. Perhaps the single person is busy with work and school and doesn’t really have time to commit to a relationship at the moment, while the person they are advising has a less stressful life. The fact that the first person’s current situation is not conducive to a relationship right now doesn’t mean they are any less insightful when advising the second person.

  Or consider that the first person is simply less physically attractive so they are getting less opportunities coming their way. They may be wise to hold out until they meet someone that meets their standards. During this period, they may have a friend who is more physically attractive and receives more opportunities and could still offer them useful advice.

  What if a person had a traumatic childhood and has been in therapy to heal that? Remaining single for a while might be better than jumping prematurely into a relationship. And yet, especially as a result of being in therapy, they may have more insight than many of their friends who are rarely single. They might even have more insight because they took some time to be single and work with a therapist.

• Relationship knowledge doesn’t only come from romantic relationships – A lot of the skills and insight needed to have a healthy relationship are the same whether it is with a relative, a friend or a lover. All of these situations require a capacity for honesty, communication, empathy, understanding and so on. A single person, even one who has never had a romantic relationship, might still have a great grasp on these capacities. Perhaps they grew up in a household in which their parents had a very healthy loving relationship with each other, as well as with their children, so these abilities were modeled for them their entire life. This might even explain why now, for all the right reasons, they have high standards that must be met before they will get into a relationship, even as it explains why they have knowledge about relationships that their other friends – perhaps from less emotionally healthy households and constantly acting out their dysfunction in unhealthy relationships – lack.

These are just some of the reasons that single people may, despite being single, be great at giving relationship advice. There are likely even more.

So if you have a single friend that offers you great advice but you worry about whether you should trust it just because they’re single, you might want to relax. Being single doesn’t necessarily make them any less qualified to have strong insight. If the content of what they’re advising you is beneficial and valuable, use it…and consider yourself lucky to have their support.