How To Be A Good Friend To A Single Person

Thank you for asking.

Welcome to Hey Shani, an advice column by Shani Silver. I am accepting new questions! Email yours to heyshanisubstack@gmail.com.

#109, May 6th, 2025

Hey Shani,

How can we partnered people best support our single friends?

Hey You,

Thank you for asking! You know how sometimes you don’t realize you’re tired until you finally sit down? That’s what this question feels like. For the majority of my late 20s and early 30s, I felt like my role as a single woman was to support my partnered friends, particularly as they met partners and got married. I spent half a decade or more being happy for and celebrating other people. While I was genuinely thrilled for them (still am), it’s kind of exhausting to live life in the backseat. I already know how to support my partnered friends because I’ve been doing it for awhile now. I feel like supporting your single friends still remains a mystery.

The term “support” is going to vary based on who you’re speaking to, and in general I put a lot of value on self-support strategies whether you’re single or partnered, but for our purposes here I’m going to focus on how partnered people can be good friends to their single friends, because honestly that’s all the support we typically need. Where we’ve been going wrong this whole time is our adherence to the societally accepted dynamic that partnered people are “correct” and single people are “incorrect” until they have a partner. As a result, friendships tend to assume the single friend is the lesser friend, and the partnered person is a superior being. We need to stop that.