Why Some Of Us Are So Bad At Spotting Red Flags

Some of us have a distinctive attitude to red flags in relationships. We can certainly see – if we push ourselves – that certain flags might exist in a prospective or actual partner. We might notice an absence of good communication, a failure to respect boundaries, an emotional reactivity, certain moments of deceitfulness, a people pleasing evasiveness… Yet what makes us special is what we choose to do next. And that is: strictly nothing.

We carry on deepening the relationship, and perhaps building an entire life with the person, because our red flag faculty is uncommonly limp and atrophied. Why has this vital muscle been neglected? We can put it like this: the ability to respond actively to red flags depends on having had a certain sort of childhood.

Imagine that we were born into a family where there was a father who bullied, a mother who betrayed us and an older brother who was tyrannical; a family where lies were the norm and where bad behaviour was meticulously swept under the carpet. How useful would it have been to keep an active eye out for ‘red flags’ in this sort of context? What could we have done if we had spotted one or ten or three thousand such flags? Taken the news to the police, alerted our friends, confronted our perpetrators? We might have been three-and-a-half years old at the time. Our survival depended precisely on not seeing, or interpreting as our fault, whatever problematic dynamics might have existed.

What’s more – and more complicatedly – we may have deeply loved the people who were draped in red. We simultaneously minded what our caregivers were doing to us and adored them. They might have been hugely mean to us at points but we instinctively chose to focus on the nice moments (the holidays by the sea, the bicycle we received). We were never going to make such a big deal about the rest. Insofar as they neglected and humiliated us, we must have been to blame. Humans spot as many red flags as they can bear to see.

With such a past behind us, we’re not going to be the first to get incensed at hints of a problematic side or two in our partners. If someone tells us they love us, this is pretty much all we need to assume that things are going to be good enough. Why focus on the downsides? That they keep talking about who else they find attractive? That they seem rather good at getting us to pay for things? That they don’t quite show up on time, ever? That they haven’t introduced us to any of their friends? That they don’t appear to have a job or any active plans to get one?

Of course these things bother us a bit. But they also bring on a kind of sleepiness. We can’t rise to the occasion that their discovery should demand. We know they are there; we prefer to think about something else.

In order to be a serious red flag watcher, we need to have grown up with an impression that our happiness, safety and well-being were supremely important matters for someone else – whom we subsequently learnt to copy in our treatment of ourselves. We need to have an original feeling that we will not let people handle us badly, that there can be nothing justified about being taken for a ride and that if we are lied to, the fault lies firmly with the liar. 

The first step towards change is to notice our peculiarity. However intelligent we may be in some areas, in relationships, we are suffering from an intense selective narcolepsy. We have no appetite to perceive problems; for we were never loved enough to feel that we deserved not to have them. 

We need to start asking ourselves some remarkably naive sounding questions: are we being handled well? Do we agree with what is happening to us? Do we dare to complain? Are we happy?

For most of us, these are obvious and natural questions. For a minority, they signal the birth of a truly significant new capacity to think more carefully and with more tenderness about our own welfare.