There’s this idea floating around that singleness is just the waiting room before real life starts. You know the drill: stay busy, work on yourself (but not too much), keep your options open, maybe scroll through the apps when you’re bored. Then one day—boom—the right person shows up and suddenly everything clicks into place. Your actual life begins.
But what if that’s backward? What if treating singleness like a holding pattern is exactly what keeps you from building the kind of foundation you’d actually want to share with someone?
The truth is a lot of people are waiting to be “relationship ready” without actually doing the work that readiness requires. And honestly, it’s not about being perfect. It’s about being whole enough that you’re not looking for someone else to fix what you’ve been avoiding in yourself.
When licensed counselor and relationship expert Debra Fileta talks about preparing for healthy relationships, she’s not talking about turning yourself into some polished version of who you think you should be. She’s talking about addressing the actual chaos—the stuff you know is there but keep pushing off until later.
“The only thing you can control is yourself,” Fileta says, and that applies just as much when you’re single as when you’re in a relationship. You can’t control when or how love shows up, but you can control whether you’re building a life that’s stable enough to actually hold it.
So what does that look like?
Get your money straight
Let’s start with the financial piece because it’s the one nobody wants to talk about until it’s too late. You don’t need to be rich or debt-free or have a perfect credit score to date someone. But you do need to not be actively drowning.
If you’re living paycheck to paycheck because you’re funding a lifestyle you can’t afford, that’s not just a budget problem—it’s a you problem. And when you eventually meet someone, that problem becomes a we problem. Student loans, credit card debt, impulsive spending habits—all of it follows you. And it doesn’t just affect your bank account. It affects your stress levels, your decision-making, your ability to show up as a stable partner.
You don’t have to have it all figured out. But you should at least be honest about where you’re at and actively working toward something better. That’s the baseline. Because nothing tanks a relationship faster than realizing the person you’re with has been ignoring their financial reality for years.
Do the emotional work
Here’s the thing about emotional baggage: everybody has it. The question is whether you’re dealing with it or just dragging it around hoping nobody notices.
Fileta talks a lot about boundaries, and one of the most important things people get wrong about boundaries is thinking they’re about other people more than ourselves.
“The focus isn’t on changing someone else,” she said. “It’s about deciding how you’re going to act when they don’t.”
That mindset doesn’t just apply to relationships—it applies to how you handle yourself.
Are you still holding onto resentment from past relationships? Are you repeating the same patterns over and over, blaming everyone else for why things don’t work out? Are you afraid of vulnerability because you got hurt once and decided never again?
None of that goes away just because you meet someone great. In fact, meeting someone great usually just brings it all to the surface faster.
Therapy isn’t some luxury reserved for people who are “really struggling.” It’s a tool. And if you’ve been carrying around unresolved pain, unaddressed anxiety or unhealthy coping mechanisms, now’s the time to deal with it. Not because you’re broken, but because you deserve to show up for your own life—and eventually someone else’s—without all that weight.
Figure out what you actually believe
Faith isn’t just something you inherit or coast on because it’s familiar. At some point you have to wrestle with what you actually believe and why. Not what your parents believe, not what your church told you to believe, but what you believe when it’s just you and God and nobody else is watching.
Because when you’re in a relationship, that foundation matters. It’s what you lean on when things get hard. It’s what shapes how you treat the person you’re with. It’s what gives you the strength to love selflessly instead of just taking what you can get.
“When you date with your identity rooted in Christ, you won’t lose yourself in the process,” Fileta says.
But that only works if your identity is actually rooted there—not just surface-level, but deep enough that it holds when life gets messy.
If you’ve been avoiding the hard questions, now’s the time. What do you believe about love? About sacrifice? About grace? About forgiveness? If you don’t know, how are you supposed to build a life with someone that reflects those values?
Build friendships that aren’t shallow
One of the biggest mistakes people make in singleness is treating friendships like placeholders until something better comes along. But friendships are the backbone of a healthy life. They’re where you learn how to communicate, how to resolve conflict, how to show up for people when it’s inconvenient.
If your friendships are shallow—if they’re just surface-level hangouts with no real depth—what makes you think you’re ready for the vulnerability a real relationship requires?
Good friendships teach you how to be known. They teach you how to ask for help, how to admit when you’re wrong, how to celebrate other people without jealousy. All of that translates directly into romantic relationships. If you can’t do it with your friends, you won’t magically be able to do it with a partner.
Plus, isolating yourself while you wait for “the one” is just a recipe for loneliness and codependency. You need people. And not just as a backup plan.
Stop treating singleness like waiting—start treating it like building
The problem with the “waiting room” mentality is that it makes you passive. You’re just sitting there, scrolling, hoping, maybe half-heartedly working on yourself but never fully committing because what’s the point if it’s all going to change when you meet someone anyway?
But singleness isn’t waiting. It’s building. It’s the season where you have the freedom to invest in yourself without splitting your attention. It’s where you figure out who you are, what you want, what you’re capable of. It’s where you lay the foundation for the life you actually want to live—not the life you think someone else will want you to live.
“Healthy relationships are formed little by little, with the natural give and take that comes with the unfolding of time,” Fileta says.
That’s true for dating, but it’s also true for building yourself. You don’t rush it. You don’t skip steps. You do the work.
Because when the right person does show up, you don’t want to be a mess hoping they’ll fix you. You want to be someone who’s already whole, already grounded, already building something worth sharing. And that’s not something you can fake. It’s something you build. Now.
