For millions of Americans navigating the exhausting churn of modern dating, the answer is rarely a new app or a clever opening line. Instead, psychologists increasingly emphasize something more fundamental: learning to be comfortable alone before seeking a relationship. That is the message from Dr.
Dan Rosenfeld, a California-based psychologist, dating coach and author, who says the single biggest mistake people make in their romantic lives happens long before they ever meet a partner. "Don't date to escape loneliness. Instead, learn to be at peace while you're alone," Rosenfeld said, in comments shared with Newsweek.
"Only then can you choose a partner intentionally, rather than cling to one out of fear." Rosenfeld's approach, distilled over years of clinical work and coaching, is a simple but often unheeded truth: readiness for love is not measured by how badly someone wants companionship, but by how capable they are of sitting with themselves without it. It is a message he says he wishes every single person could internalize before opening a dating app. Rosenfeld, who holds a Ph.D. in psychology, has built a career studying the emotional undercurrents that make-or-break relationships—the anxieties, old wounds and invisible scripts people repeat without realizing it.
His advice, he says, is aimed less at helping people couple up and more at helping them become someone worth choosing, and capable of choosing well in return. Central to that message is the idea that unresolved emotional pain does not stay contained to the person carrying it—it inevitably becomes a shared burden if not addressed before a new relationship. "Heal before you date because unresolved wounds often show up as jealousy, avoidance or neediness in relationships," Rosenfeld said.
"When you bring unhealed trauma into a relationship, you're asking someone else to hold a weight you haven't yet learned to hold yourself." It is a dynamic that therapists have long observed in couples' counseling: partners unconsciously project old fears of abandonment, betrayal and inadequacy onto new relationships, recreating the very pain they are trying to escape. Rosenfeld argues that self-awareness, not chemistry alone, is what allows people to break that cycle. Understanding the psychological framework behind those patterns, he says, is essential.
Attachment theory—the idea that early bonds with caregivers shape how people relate to partners as adults—has surged in popularity in recent years, cropping up everywhere from TikTok therapy content to bestselling relationship books. Rosenfeld says that popularity is earned and that the concept is not just social media fluff. "Attachment styles are real and worth understanding," he said.
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