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.

Here are just some of our favorite quotes on relationships.

• “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” – Carl Jung in Modern Man in Search of a Soul

• “Seldom or never does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly without crisis. There is no birth of consciousness without pain.” – Carl Jung in “Marriage as a Psychological Relationship”

• “They say that breaking up is hard to do, but that is wrong. It’s easy to walk away before the going gets tough, to find another dreamboat – until the ship starts to sink again. It’s waking up that’s hard to do. ” – Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. in Keeping the Love You Find: A Single Person’s Guide to Achieving Lasting Love

• “Speculation about that elusive quality known as romantic chemistry has baffled scientists and poets alike. In my experience, ‘chemistry’ is based on a similarity according to where you fall on the emotional dyslexia continuum…People who don’t have adult skills haven’t transformed their childlike needs into adult needs, and they’re more likely to rely on superficial qualities in a partner. Basically, they don’t know what would satisfy them if their needs were ‘grown up.’ So they look for mates through a child’s notion of romance. They don’t know themselves well enough to pick partners with whom they’ll share something deep and lasting. ” – Helen Kramer in Liberating the Adult Within: How to Be a Grown-Up For Good

• “When a child is uncertain or pessimistic about his or her value, the child strives to understand and become what is perceived as pleasing to the parents. The normal need for approval becomes a craving and children take to heart extreme messages they are given about their worth. If a child is told, verbally or nonverbally, that he or she is of little value, young parts of the child organize their beliefs around that premise. They become desperate for redemption in the eyes of the person who gave these messages. Thereafter these parts carry the burden of worthlessness, which makes them believe that no one can love them – a belief they will maintain no matter what feedback is received from others…These burdened young parts exert a powerful influence over the person’s intimate relationships as they constantly seek redemption – the lifting of what feels like a curse of unlovability. They will return to the person who stole their self-esteem in this quest, or they will find someone who resembles that person. Often this results in a history of abuse or unsatisfying relationships.” – Richard C. Schwartz, Ph.D. in Internal Family Systems Therapy

• “Now we arrive at the heart of the matter. Our ‘free’ choice of a mate is, in the end, a product of our unconscious, which has an agenda of its own. And what the unconscious wants is to become whole and to heal the wounds of childhood. To this end, it is carrying around its own detailed picture of a proper match, searching not for the right stats, but for the right chemistry. And what is that chemistry? Nothing more than our unconscious attraction to someone who we feel will meet our particular emotional needs. Specifically, that need is to cover the ‘shortfall’ of childhood by having our mates fill in the psychological gaps left by our imperfect childhood caretakers. How do we go about that? By falling madly in love with someone who has both the positive and the negative traits of our imperfect parents, someone who fits an image that we carry deep inside us and for whose embodiment we are unconsciously searching. ” – Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. in Keeping the Love You Find: A Single Person’s Guide to Achieving Lasting Love

• “Marriage is the most complicated of all human relationships. Few alliances can produce such extremes of emotion or can so quickly travel from professions of the utmost bliss to that cold, terminal legal write-off, mental cruelty. When one stops to consider the massive content of archaic data which each partner brings to the marriage through the continuing contributions of his Parent and Child, one can readily see the necessity of an emancipated Adult in each to make this relationship work. Yet the average marriage contract is made by the Child, which understands love as something you feel and not something you do, and which sees happiness as something you pursue rather than a by-product of working toward the happiness of someone other than yourself.” – Thomas A. Harris, M.D. in I’m OK, You’re OK

• “When partners don’t tell each other what they want and constantly criticize each other for missing the boat, it’s no wonder that the spirit of love and cooperation disappears. In its place comes the grim determination of the power struggle, in which each partner tries to force the other to meet his or her needs. Even though their partners react to these maneuvers with renewed hostility, they persevere. Why? Because in their unconscious minds they fear that, if their needs are not met, they will die. This is a classic example of what Freud called the ‘repetition compulsion,’ the tendency of human beings to repeat ineffective behaviors over and over again.” – Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. in Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples

• “That rage is a vital expression of life energy is readily apparent. If we repress our anger, we become sick or depressed or condemned to a pale, muted existence. But, on the other hand, if we unleash our rage, we inflict physical or emotional damage on others. How can we release our anger and not hurt the people we love? The answer is a process called ‘containment.’”– Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. in Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples

• “The people you are attracted to may not be right for you emotionally, but you’re drawn to them anyway. Something about them – often something less than flattering – reminds you on some level of your father or mother. The person could be rejecting or critical, controlling or domineering, emotionally distant or unavailable. When you encounter someone like this as an adult, it arouses the feeling of longing and insecurity you experienced in your relationship with one of your parents – feelings of emotional hunger that you’ve come to associate with love…The antidote is to recognize this pattern and avoid recreating your emotional past. Your goal is to seek emotionally substantial relationships.” – Susan Anderson in The Journey from Abandonment to Healing: Turn the End of a Relationship into the Beginning of a New Life

• “Fortunately, we do have a choice about what kind of marriage we have. Most marriages fail because of the persistence of the unconscious aspects of the relationship. Any unfinished business we had with our caretakers becomes a compelling agenda with our partners. All too commonly, however, the partners never become aware of the hidden needs that drive their relationship and never learn the skills they need to successfully address those needs. As a single, part of your preparation is to understand and prepare for a conscious marriage in which you and your future partner can undo the damage of childhood and recover your true selves.” – Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. in Keeping the Love You Find: A Single Person’s Guide to Achieving Lasting Love

• “Romantic love is supposed to end. It is nature’s glue, which brings two incompatible people together for the purpose of mutual growth, and enables them to survive the disillusionment that they did not marry perfect people. Though romantic love is a foretaste of the potential in the relationship, that potential can only be reached through the valley of despair that is the power struggle. If we do not use the relationship to finish childhood, our marriages will get bogged down in the same issues we were stuck in as children. When romantic love dies, it clears the way for real love.” – Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. in Keeping the Love You Find: A Single Person’s Guide to Achieving Lasting Love

• “An ability to accept our ambivalence toward others may be an important ingredient in relationships that are healthy and lasting.” – Fred Rogers in You Are Special: Words of Wisdom for All Ages from a Beloved Neighbor

• “Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” – James Baldwin

We hope you’ve enjoyed and learned a lot from these quotes on relationships!