The Best Lifestyle Habits for Singles Looking for a Long Term Relationship

Several of the habits that predict a lasting relationship can be built before the relationship starts. Long-running studies of couples point to how people sleep, how they handle money, how they treat friends and how generous they are, and each of these can be practised while single. A person who builds them now brings them into the next relationship from the first week.

Keeping Close Friendships

The Harvard Study of Adult Development has followed the same group of men, and later their families, since 1938, starting with 724 participants. Its director, the psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, has said that satisfaction with relationships at age 50 predicted health at age 80 better than cholesterol levels did. In an interview with the Harvard Gazette, he said the team had expected cholesterol or blood pressure at 50 to matter more, and that satisfaction in relationships, particularly marriages, was the strongest predictor of a happy and healthy old age.

The study found that the quality of close relationships mattered more than the number of friends someone had. For a single person, that is a reason to invest in a few deep friendships now. Keeping a friendship going through busy years takes some of the skills a long relationship needs, such as showing up regularly and repairing things after an argument.

Getting Regular Sleep

A bad night’s sleep shows up in the next day’s arguments. In research published in 2014, the Berkeley psychologists Amie Gordon and Serena Chen asked 78 young adults in relationships to keep a daily diary for two weeks. On days after a poor night’s sleep, they reported more conflict with their partners.

A second experiment brought 71 couples into the lab, asked them how they had slept, and filmed them discussing a disagreement. Those who had slept badly were more negative toward their partners and less accurate at reading their partners’ emotions, and the pairs resolved the conflict less well. Even people who usually slept well showed the effect after a single bad night. A steady sleep routine is easier to set up alone than after moving in with someone who keeps different hours.

Reviewing Past Relationships

The time between relationships is a good moment to look at what went wrong in earlier ones. A review of past partners can turn up repeated patterns, such as enabling unhealthy relationships by covering for a partner’s drinking or excusing promises that were broken again and again. Seeing the pattern written down makes it easier to spot early the next time.

Some people do this work with a therapist. In England, the NHS Talking Therapies service received about 1.8 million referrals in 2023 to 2024, and 69% of them were self-referrals, so most people asked for help directly without going through a doctor first. Among those who completed a course of treatment, which averaged 8.2 sessions, 50.1% met the service’s measure of recovery.

Managing Money Openly

Arguments about money are a strong warning sign for a marriage. In a 2012 study published in Family Relations, Jeffrey Dew, Sonya Britt and Sandra Huston analysed data from 4,574 American couples and found that disagreements about money were the strongest predictor of divorce among the kinds of disagreement they measured, for both husbands and wives.

The study also found that a couple’s financial well-being did not predict divorce once money arguments were taken into account, which points to the conflict itself. Budgeting and talking calmly about debt can both be practised alone, and they remove some of the reasons for those arguments before a relationship begins.

Knowing Your Drinking Habits

Couples tend to be happier when their drinking habits match. A 2016 study led by Kira Birditt at the University of Michigan looked at 2,767 married couples over the age of 50. Couples in which both partners drank, or neither did, reported the highest marital satisfaction, and couples with mismatched habits reported the lowest.

A later analysis by the same team, published in The Gerontologist, found that older couples with matching drinking habits also had a higher survival rate than couples whose habits differed. Birditt was careful to say that the findings were not advice to drink more. Knowing how much you drink, and how much it matters to you, makes it possible to look for a partner whose habits fit and to notice early if a new partner’s drinking would cause friction.

Putting the Phone Away

Phone use at the table causes conflict for a sizeable minority of couples. In two surveys published in 2016, James Roberts and Meredith David of Baylor University found that partner phubbing, checking a phone while in a partner’s company, lowered relationship satisfaction by causing arguments over phone use. In the second survey of 145 adults in relationships, 46.3% said their partner phubbed them, and 22.6% said it caused conflict between them. The opposite habit can be practised long before a first date, by leaving the phone in a bag during a meal out or turning off notifications for an evening, so it does not have to be learned while a new partner is watching.

Practising Generosity

In a 2013 study in the Journal of Marriage and Family, Jeffrey Dew and Bradford Wilcox surveyed 1,365 married couples about generosity, which they defined as small acts of kindness, displays of affection and a willingness to forgive. In their data, a generous marriage was usually a more satisfied one, with less conflict and a lower perceived chance of divorce.

The benefit also went to the giver. People who reported being generous toward their spouse rated their own marriages more highly. The authors noted that the link could run in both directions, since a happy marriage may also make people more generous. Small daily kindnesses toward friends and colleagues build the same habit before a relationship begins.

The Cost of Waiting

Most of these studies followed people who were already in relationships, the point at which these habits are hardest to change. A person who meets the right partner while sleeping badly, arguing about money and drinking in a way the partner dislikes has to change all three in the middle of a new relationship, often while the partner is still deciding if they want to stay. The same changes, made in the months or years before, cost nothing in the relationship itself and give it a better start.