Do your friends know if you’re ready for love? Here’s what the research says

A new study has found that your friends might have a pretty good idea of whether you are truly ready for a serious romantic relationship. Researchers discovered that people and their friends generally agree on how prepared someone is for commitment. Furthermore, the study revealed that friends tend to perceive those who seem anxious or avoidant in relationships as being less ready to settle down. The findings have been published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.

Past research has shown that friends can influence who we date and how long our relationships last. They might introduce us to potential partners, offer advice, or simply provide support that strengthens our romantic bonds. One factor that is increasingly recognized as important for starting and maintaining relationships is “commitment readiness.” This refers to how prepared someone feels to be in a committed relationship.

The researchers were curious whether our friends can sense our commitment readiness and if their perceptions align with our own. They also wanted to understand if friends’ views on our readiness are related to how we generally approach relationships, specifically our attachment style. Attachment style describes the way we typically connect with others in close relationships and can range from secure to insecure (anxious or avoidant).

“We often have an inner sense of our readiness for committed love, but feeling ready doesn’t guarantee a relationship,” said study author Hyewon Yang, a PhD student in the Department of Psychology at Michigan State University.

“In fact, friends play a key role in forming and maintaining romantic relationships—from introductions to advice—but there rarely is a chance to know how they perceive us. We were surprised to see that there was no research so far looking into friends’ perceptions of people’s readiness for commitment. Therefore, we conducted this study to examine how friends perceive each other’s readiness for committed love.”

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For their study, the researchers recruited 193 groups of four friends, totaling 772 participants. The participants were primarily young adults from the United States, with an average age of around 19. Most identified as women and were predominantly White or Asian. On average, the friends had known each other for about three and a half years. Each person in the group completed online questionnaires individually, rating themselves and each of their three friends on various aspects of relationships.

The questionnaires measured two key constructs: commitment readiness and attachment style. To assess commitment readiness, participants used a brief questionnaire that asked them to rate how ready they and their friends were to be in a committed relationship. For example, they might have been asked to agree or disagree with statements like “[Friend’s Name] is not ready to be in a committed relationship at this time” (with items reverse-scored for consistency).

To measure attachment style, the researchers used a questionnaire that assessed both attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance. Attachment anxiety reflects worry about being abandoned or rejected in relationships, while attachment avoidance describes discomfort with closeness and intimacy. Participants rated themselves and their friends on statements related to these styles, such as “[Friend’s Name] is afraid that other people may abandon them” (anxiety) or “[Friend’s Name] finds it easy to depend on others” (avoidance, reverse-scored).

After collecting all the data, Yang and her colleagues used a statistical technique called the Social Relations Model to analyze the responses. This model is useful for understanding ratings within groups, such as friend groups, as it allows researchers to break down the ratings into different components.

One component was “target variance,” which reflects how much friends generally agree with each other about a particular person. Another component was “perceiver variance,” which indicates if some people tend to rate everyone similarly—for example, if someone generally thinks everyone is ready for commitment. The model also considered “relationship variance,” which shows if ratings are influenced by the unique pairing of friends, and finally “error,” which accounts for random variation. The researchers then examined how these different components related to commitment readiness and attachment styles.

The researchers observed strong agreement among friends about commitment readiness. The target variance for commitment readiness was high, meaning that friends tended to see eye-to-eye on who in their group was more or less ready for a committed relationship. This agreement was stronger for commitment readiness than for attachment anxiety or avoidance, suggesting that readiness might be more easily observable to friends.

“It was very interesting to see that how our friends perceive our readiness for a committed relationship overlapped pretty much with what we think about our readiness,” Yang told PsyPost. “So it may suggest that we are not overly biased about how ready we are for a relationship.”

Yang and her colleagues also found that people who were seen as more anxious or avoidant in their attachment style were also seen as less ready for commitment by their friends. This suggests that friends pick up on cues related to attachment insecurity and link them to someone’s readiness for a serious relationship. In other words, if your friends perceive you as being uneasy about intimacy or worried about rejection, they might also think you are not quite ready to settle down.

Finally, the researchers discovered a phenomenon known as “assumed similarity” in judgments. People who considered themselves ready for commitment were also more likely to perceive their friends as ready too. This finding suggests that our own feelings about commitment readiness can color how we view our friends.

“The three key takeaways are: 1) friends significantly agreed on who was more ready for a committed, long-term relationship, 2) these friends’ perceptions of a person’s readiness were not too different from how that person felt about their own readiness, and 3) those perceived as more insecure in their relationships were also seen as less ready for a committed relationship,” Yang said.

Like all research, this study has some limitations. It only examined perceptions within friend groups, so it would be helpful to know if these findings extend to other types of relationships, such as those with family members or acquaintances. Also, because the study was cross-sectional—done at one point in time—it cannot show cause and effect.

“Our finding that those perceived to be insecurely attached were also seen as less ready for a relationship does not imply causality,” Yang explained. “It could be that perceptions of insecurity guide judgments about readiness, but it could also be that if someone communicates that they are not ready for a relationship, friends may then infer that the person is insecure about relationships.”

Future studies could follow people over time to see if friends’ perceptions of commitment readiness actually predict future relationship outcomes, such as relationship formation or stability. It would also be valuable to explore why friends perceive someone as ready or not ready for commitment—perhaps they are picking up on specific behaviors or communication styles.

“I’d love to do a follow-up with this sample to see if and how those who were perceived as ready by their friends differ from others in future romantic relationships,” Yang said. “Also, the sense of insecurity in a relationship and the feeling of being ready for committed love might change over time. Therefore, it would be interesting to see if growing more confident and secure in a relationship would lead someone to seem more ready for a serious relationship than before.”

“This study is one of the few with a large round-robin design focused on young adult friends. This also means that the findings may offer insights for young adults navigating romance, encouraging open communication with peers and seeking support from them to foster healthy romantic relationships and friendships.”

The study, “Ready (for love) or not? Self and other perceptions of commitment readiness and associations with attachment orientations,” was authored by Hyewon Yang, Rebekka Weidmann, Mariah F. Purol, Robert A. Ackerman, Richard E. Lucas, and William J. Chopik.