When you are weighing up whether to start dating again, or whether to get more serious, you may find yourself asking friends what they think. A recent study suggests that your friends often see readiness for commitment in similar ways. That agreement is interesting, but it does not show that their view is right, or that it predicts how a relationship will go.
The paper, "Ready (for love) or not? Self and other perceptions of commitment readiness and associations with attachment orientations", was published in 2025 in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. The first author is Hyewon Yang, with colleagues including Richard Lucas and William Chopik, and the work was reported through a Michigan State University news release carried by ScienceDaily in February 2025. The news article does not say in which country the participants lived.
The study involved nearly 800 people who belonged to friend groups, and it focused on young adults. The researchers used a round-robin design, which is a way of letting every person in a group rate every other person as well as themselves. Participants reported on their own readiness for a committed relationship, on how ready they thought their friends were, and on their friends' attachment styles. The report describes this as one of only a few designs to look at young adult friends in this way.
Attachment orientation here refers to how secure or insecure people tend to be in close relationships. Insecure attachment is described as higher anxiety, higher avoidance, or both. The researchers asked whether the people who seemed less ready for commitment were also seen as more insecure.
The main result was that friends significantly agreed with one another about who was ready for a committed relationship and who was not. In other words, when several friends rated the same person, their views tended to line up.
The second result was that people seen as less ready for commitment were also seen as more insecure in their relationships. The picture, then, was of a link between how ready a person looked to their friends and how secure or insecure those friends judged them to be.
The news report is a short summary, so it does not give the size of these links, the measures used or the statistical methods. It also does not say whether participants' own ratings of themselves matched the views of their friends, and it does not describe any finding that went against these two results. Readers who want the numbers should consult the full paper.
Agreement among friends is not the same as accuracy. Friends could agree because they share the same information, the same impressions or the same assumptions about what readiness looks like. The study as reported does not show that their assessment predicts whether someone will later form a lasting relationship, or that readiness can be read accurately from the outside.
The link between less readiness and more insecurity is an association. It does not show that insecurity makes someone unready, or that either is a fixed trait. People change, and the same person may feel very differently about commitment at different times. A person could be rated as unready by friends and feel quite ready themselves, or the reverse.
It is also worth remembering the setting. The participants were mostly young adults in friend groups who knew each other. The findings may not describe people who have fewer close friends, people at other life stages, or friends who rarely talk about relationships. The news report also leaves out cultural background.
And friends' opinions are only that. Being described as not ready by others is not a diagnosis or a verdict, and no friend group has the final say about your life. The study is better read as a prompt to think about trusted feedback than as a test you can sit.
If worries about relationships are causing you distress, speaking with a GP or a qualified counsellor is a sensible step.
Source: Ready (for love) or not? Self and other perceptions of commitment readiness and associations with attachment orientations (ScienceDaily report: Ready (or not) for love? Your friends likely agree) DOI: 10.1177/02654075251317920
Illustration of reflecting on relationship readiness with trusted friends. AI-generated editorial illustration. This article summarises published research in our own words and is general information, not personal health advice.
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