When you are single, you get a lot of advice. When you are single longer than people think you should be, you get even more advice – from everyone – all the time.

Sources of Advice

You especially get a lot of advice from married people who have long since forgotten how hard it can be being single. They assume that since they have “graduated” out of singleness and have “achieved” marriage, they are now qualified to give you advice.

Of course, the single people who think they have it all figured out also have a lot of advice to give you. Since they have given up on ever getting married and have embraced their single lifestyle, they believe they can guide you to a similar place of disdain for and distrust of the opposite sex and acceptance of your inevitable, preferable, lifelong singleness.

And of course, friends, siblings, aunts, uncles, and a plethora of bloggers and YouTube-ers all weigh in with widely varied advice as well. Even your ex may have advice on what you should do differently next time around. A lot of the advice you receive will probably be contradictory and will definitely vary in quality.

So, be careful who you take advice from. Not all sources are of equal value. Give more weight to advice from single people who are thriving and married people who were thriving while they were single and are now happily married.

Bad Advice

In short, there is no end to the bad advice you receive when you are single. I covered some of the worst, including “you’re too picky” and “get right back on that horse”, in my post aptly titled Bad Advice for Singles. You should also read my post “Just Be Yourself” to find out how that can be the worst or best advice people give you. But, there is still plenty more bad advice out there to cover.

So, here we go with three more pieces of advice people love to give singles.

Bad Advice:

Best Way to Get Over Somebody …

Although I only came across this in the last six months, apparently it has been around quite a while. The advice goes like this – the best way to get over somebody is to get under somebody else.

There are a number of reasons this advice appeals to so many people. None of those reasons are healthy. Some people want to make their ex jealous. Some just want to show their ex that they’ve “still got it”. Others want to show their ex that they are over them.

The dysfunction in those motivations is obvious. They all have to do with showing your ex. That is a terrible reason to have sex. What it shows is that you are not over your ex. It shows they still have influence and control over you.

Another reason this advice is so popular is that, well, it turns out, people like sex. So, anything that promotes having sex is bound to be popular. People love hearing good news about their bad habits and bad behaviors. So, they love hearing that there might be a legitimate reason to engage in the bad behavior they were going to engage in any way.

But, even leaving sex out of the equation for a moment, who does this method appeal to? I mean, of course, it appeals to people who want to have sex, but who else does it appeal to?

This method is most often used by needy people who cannot stand to be alone any length of time. It is used by people who will probably go through a succession of dead-end relationships before they figure out that they need to get off of that merry-go-round for a while to break that dysfunctional dating cycle.

Better Advice

The less popular, but more healthy approach is to take all the time necessary ...