Your best friend knows you better than anyone. They've seen you through breakups, celebrated your wins, and spent countless hours analyzing why that text took three hours to get a response. When you're confused about someone new, they're the first person you call.
And their advice is probably terrible.
Not because they don't care. Not because they're trying to sabotage you. But because the same psychological mechanisms that make them invested in your happiness systematically undermine their ability to give you good guidance about relationships.
The Success Rate Problem
Start with the uncomfortable baseline: about 40-50% of first marriages in the United States end in divorce. The numbers get worse from there—60% of second marriages fail, and 73% of third marriages.
This means the friends giving you relationship advice have, at best, a 30-40% success rate themselves. They're operating from limited data—often just their own experiences, which may or may not have worked out well. You're taking navigation advice from people who are, statistically, lost more often than not.
But even if your friend happened to find lasting love, that doesn't make them qualified to advise you. Because the psychological biases that govern advice-giving are profound, well-documented, and nearly impossible to overcome.
When Investment Becomes Interference
Research from Yale School of Management reveals a fundamental problem with advice-giving: people become more risk-averse when choosing for others than when choosing for themselves. The closer the relationship between adviser and advisee, the worse this gets.
Yale researchers Jason Dana and Daylian Cain found that advisers have limited capacity for what they call "symhedonia"—positive feelings about others' good fortune. Instead, people feel much stronger sympathy for others' losses. This creates a systematic bias: your friend weighs the risk of you getting hurt far more heavily than the potential for you finding something great.
The result? They advise you to be more cautious than you need to be. That person who seems great but has one yellow flag your friend noticed? They'll tell you to walk away, because the pain of watching you get hurt outweighs any joy they'd feel seeing you happy. It's not malicious—it's hardwired human psychology.
The Yale research goes further: making advisers more accountable for outcomes doesn't improve their advice—it makes them even more risk-averse. Encouraging closer personal relationships between advisers and advisees makes both parties more cautious about straining the social bond, leading to less honest but "safer" guidance.
The Projection Trap
Your friend isn't just advising a generic person—they're advising you. But they can only do so from their current emotional state, not yours. Psychologists call this the "empathy gap," and it fundamentally distorts how people give advice.
When your friend is happily coupled up, they're in what researchers call a "cold" emotional state—rational, calm, not experiencing the visceral feelings you're navigating. Research shows that people in cold states systematically underestimate how much emotions influence decision-making. They give you advice as if you can think as clearly as they currently are, forgetting what it actually feels like to be uncertain, excited, or anxious about someone new.
Conversely, if your friend is going through their own relationship chaos, they project that emotional state onto your situation. Studies on parental empathy gaps found that parents who reported feeling negative emotions consistently overestimated their children's distress, while optimistic parents underestimated their children's worries. The same mechanism plays out in friendship: your friend's current emotional state colors how they interpret your situation.
The Effort Problem
Even when friends want to give good advice, they often don't put in the cognitive work required. Research published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization found that advice-givers frequently use simplified heuristics rather than processing new information properly.
The study discovered that people giving advice often follow what researchers call a "Win-Stay-Lose-Go" heuristic: recommend what worked for them, avoid what didn't, regardless of whether your situation matches theirs. Some advice-givers never update their recommendations at all, simply pushing whatever worked (or didn't work) in their own experience.
The researchers found that "unwillingness to exert effort may be the main driving force for bad advice." Your friend's brain is taking shortcuts, pattern-matching your situation to their own experiences without doing the harder work of understanding how your situation might be fundamentally different.
Interestingly, the study also found that narcissistic personality traits were negatively correlated with advice quality—the more someone enjoyed being the advice-giver, the less effort they put into actually giving good advice.
The Appearance of Partiality
Here's where it gets even more complicated: sometimes friends give you bad advice specifically because they're trying too hard not to appear biased.
Research in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology documented something counterintuitive: when decisions are public or will be scrutinized by others, people actually become biased against their friends to avoid appearing partial. Your friend might talk you out of something good for you simply because they're worried about what others will think if they encouraged you toward it.
The study found that allocators were reluctant to give benefits to deserving friends when their decision was public, even when the friend clearly merited it. The researchers concluded that "attempts to avoid appearing partial can actually lead people to be biased against their friends."
In the context of relationship advice, this means your friend might discourage you from pursuing someone they privately think could be great for you, simply because they don't want other friends to think they're being a cheerleader for a risky choice.
The Friend-Matching Delusion
Given how much friends struggle to give good advice about your existing relationships, it seems almost absurd that dating apps have tried to solve the matching problem by letting friends do the swiping for you.
Apps like Wingman and Wingr launched with an appealing premise: let your friends, who know you best, create your profile and choose your matches. The founder of Wingman told press that friends could provide "trusted and authentic testimonials" and make better choices than you could on your own.
But these apps face the same fundamental problems as friend advice: projection bias, risk-aversion, and effort. Your friend writes your profile from their perspective of you—which may not match how you see yourself or how you want to be seen. They swipe based on what they think you need, filtered through their own relationship experiences and current emotional state. They use simplified heuristics ("you like tall guys, he's tall, swipe right") rather than understanding the nuanced combination of factors that actually creates chemistry.
The apps have struggled to gain meaningful traction precisely because the premise—that friends make better matchmakers—runs counter to the psychology of advice-giving. One user review captured it perfectly: "Love the idea of it... However, there isn't a way to be a wingman for someone without signing yourself up to look for someone, and as someone in a relationship I'm not 100% comfortable having a dating profile."
Even when friends do swipe for you, they can't escape their own biases. They filter potential matches through their values, their risk tolerance, their projection of what you need. The result is matches that might make sense to your friend but don't actually work for you.
So Who Should You Actually Ask?
If friends are systematically bad at relationship advice, where do you turn? The research points to a specific type of perspective that works better: someone who knows your patterns deeply but isn't emotionally invested in your choices.
Therapists occupy this space professionally—they know your history and patterns without the risk-aversion bias of friendship. But therapy is expensive, time-intensive, and not designed for real-time relationship navigation. You don't call your therapist when you're wondering if you should text back or what that comment really meant.
This is the gap that a different kind of relationship intelligence can fill. Imagine something that knows your communication patterns as well as a therapist, responds as quickly as a friend, but doesn't carry the psychological baggage that makes both of them give biased advice. Not a friend who will protect you from risk. Not an algorithm that reduces you to swipe-able attributes. But something that understands your patterns, recognizes what you actually need, and isn't afraid to tell you when you're overthinking or when your gut is right.
The future of relationship advice isn't asking your coupled-up friend what they think or letting them swipe for you. It's having access to someone who's studied your specific patterns without the empathy gaps, projection biases, and risk-aversion that plague human advice-givers. Someone who can say "based on how you've described your past relationships, here's what I'm noticing" without worrying about whether you'll still want to get brunch next week.
What To Do Right Now
While you're waiting for that ideal adviser to exist, here's how to navigate friend advice more effectively:
Ask about patterns, not predictions. Don't ask "do you think I should text him?" Ask "what do you notice about how I talk about him compared to how I talked about my ex?" Friends are better at observing your patterns than predicting your outcomes.
Consider their emotional state. Is your friend currently happy in a relationship? Going through a breakup? Their advice will be colored by their current experience. Weight it accordingly.
Notice whose advice consistently feels right. Not all friends give equally bad advice. Some people's perspectives tend to resonate with you while others consistently miss the mark. Track this over time and weight accordingly.
Ask multiple people, then look for consensus. Individual friends will have biases, but patterns across multiple friends can be informative. If five different people notice the same thing, that's signal, not noise.
Remember that their advice reflects their values, not yours. When a friend says "I would never put up with that," what they're really telling you is what they value and what they'd tolerate. That might not match what matters to you.
Most importantly: understand that when friend advice feels off, it probably is. Not because your friends don't love you, but because love doesn't override the systematic biases that make humans terrible at advising each other about relationships. The same emotional investment that makes them care is exactly what distorts their judgment.
Your friends mean well. They love you. They want you to be happy. And that's precisely why you shouldn't always listen to them.