Being in a long-term cohabiting monogamous relationship was a powerful learning experience for a number of reasons. The most obvious one is that you have someone around all of the time who you need to negotiate with, account for, and keep happy.

There are a few less obvious reasons why it's such a learning experience. If you spend a few years removed from the dating game, you have the opportunity to view it from a much more dispassionate perspective with the pressure off. Also if you're publicly unavailable you can practise flirting without consequence, which is useful for calibrating your sense of what you can and can't get away with.

You also have access to a relationship dynamic which is generally unavailable to the single: people with whom you have mutually-acknowledged mutual attraction that isn't going to get acted upon. "Here's a crapload of tension we can't do anything about. Let's talk about it." It's like Christmas Day football in no-man's-land.