The Best Books for Singles, Recommended by a Matchmaker Who Has Actually Read Them

Updated March 2026

Over the years I’ve recommended a lot of books to clients — sometimes because a pattern I’m seeing in their search points directly to something a specific book addresses, and sometimes just because it’s the kind of thing that shifts how you think about relationships in ways that make every other part of the process easier. These are the nine I come back to most consistently, and why each one is worth your time.

1. Attached — Amir Levine and Rachel Heller

If you read one book on this list, make it this one. Attachment theory — the idea that adults have consistent patterns in how they relate to intimacy, shaped largely by early experience — is the single most useful framework I’ve found for understanding why dating goes the way it does for most people. Once you understand your own attachment style and can recognize them in others, a lot of previously confusing dating behavior becomes completely legible. This book is research-backed, readable, and practically useful in a way that most relationship books aren’t.

2. How to Not Die Alone — Logan Ury

Logan Ury is a behavioral scientist who spent years at Google before becoming a dating researcher, and this book shows it. It’s rigorous in a way that most dating advice isn’t — grounded in actual research about what predicts relationship success and what doesn’t. The chapter on the three types of single people (romanticizers, maximizers, and hesitaters) is something I reference constantly with clients. Highly practical, no fluff.

3. The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work — John Gottman

Gottman spent decades in his “Love Lab” studying couples and identifying with remarkable accuracy which ones would stay together and which would divorce. This book distills that research into something actionable. I recommend it to singles because understanding what makes relationships work before you’re in one is far more useful than trying to retrofit the knowledge after the fact. The section on what he calls “the four horsemen” — the communication patterns that reliably predict relationship failure — is worth the price of the book alone.

4. Deeper Dating — Ken Page

This one is for people who keep ending up in the same relationship patterns regardless of who they’re with. Page is a psychotherapist who has spent his career working with singles, and his central argument — that most people are attracted to the wrong qualities for the wrong reasons, and that genuine intimacy requires a different kind of attraction — is uncomfortable in exactly the way useful things often are. It’s one of the more honest books I’ve read about why capable, intelligent people keep getting this wrong.

5. Keeping the Love You Find — Harville Hendrix

Hendrix wrote the better-known Getting the Love You Want for couples, but this one is specifically for singles and I find it more useful at the pre-relationship stage. The core idea — that we unconsciously seek out partners who recreate the emotional dynamics of our earliest relationships, for better and worse — is explored here with more depth and more practical application than most books that touch on the same territory.

6. The Five Love Languages — Gary Chapman

A classic for good reason. The framework — that people give and receive love in five primary ways (words of affirmation, quality time, acts of service, gifts, and physical touch), and that mismatches in love language create a lot of relationship friction that has nothing to do with how much two people care about each other — is simple enough to remember and useful enough to apply immediately. Worth reading before you’re in a relationship so you know your own language going in.

7. The Art of Possibility — Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander

This is the only book on this list that isn’t specifically about dating or relationships — it’s about how you think about what’s possible in your life, and whether the framework you’re operating from is expanding or contracting your world. I recommend it to clients who have become cynical about dating, who have decided (consciously or not) that the right person probably doesn’t exist or that it’s probably too late. It’s the most effective antidote I’ve found to that particular kind of stuck.

8. The Soulmate Secret — Arielle Ford

I’ll be honest — this one is more intuitive and less research-based than the others on this list, and it won’t resonate with everyone. But for clients who are doing everything right strategically and still feel blocked in some less tangible way, Ford’s approach to clarifying what you actually want and removing internal resistance to finding it has been genuinely useful. Take it on its own terms.

9. Relationship Goals — Michael Todd

A candid, values-driven book about what it means to build something real with another person. Todd is a pastor and the book reflects that perspective, so it will resonate more with some readers than others — but the core questions he asks about what you’re actually building toward and whether your behavior reflects your stated priorities are worth sitting with regardless of your background.

If you’re doing the reading and ready to put the work into practice, apply for a private consultation here. And if you’re interested in more perspective from the matchmaking side, the Lyons Elite journal covers most of the territory these books explore from a practitioner’s point of view.