Why Women Ignore Red Flags

We’re told not to trust our gut feelings

I love reading confessional blog posts — the more vulnerable the better.

Because I read a lot about sex and relationships, one of the recurring themes I encounter is the bad breakup, the abusive ex-boyfriend or ex-husband, the shitty friend with benefits, and the guy you thought you were dating but he was just stringing you along.

Looking back, we can trace what happened. That’s what makes articles like these so helpful. They’re not just interesting stories; they also show us patterns that we can watch out for in our own lives.

Another one of the themes with these articles isn’t even in the articles themselves. It’s in the comments section.

There are always two or three guys (yeah, I hate to say it, but it’s almost always guys) who will point to a few red flags mentioned in the article and question why the writer didn’t bail at the first sign of them.

Sometimes, the comments are more sinister than that. They imply that women who ignore those red flags only have themselves to blame when things go south.

If you haven’t had experiences like these yourself, I can get why it might be hard to understand why women seem to keep getting themselves in these situations.

There are two reasons, really. The big one is that a lot of red flags are only easy to spot in retrospect. But another problem is that even when we do notice red flags, we’re often encouraged to ignore them.

We’re Serving Up the Narrative

When we share our stories of bad encounters, they’re often framed in a way that highlights every sketchy moment and shines a spotlight on them.

We’re not giving a chronological play-by-play of what happened to us (not if we know how to tell a good story, anyway). We’re building up to our realization that the guys we thought were decent turned out to be total sketchballs, and to do that we have to pick out those little off moments.

And we often serve them up with a title that makes it clear exactly what kind of people we’re writing about.

When I publish articles called I Didn’t Know I Was Raped or What an Abusive Relationship Taught Me About My Sexual Desires, every reader knows exactly what kind of asshole I’m talking about even if I didn’t realize it when I first met them.

So, yeah, hindsight is 20/20.

In retrospect, we can see all the things that should have tipped us off. We can see all the little signs that we should’ve run. But in the moment, those aren’t always so clear.

When we’re sharing our stories, the red flags seem obvious, because you’re getting the retrospective narrative — the perfectly clear assessment of what happened after the fact. That’s one of the reasons it’s easy to read those stories and think “She should’ve known better.”

Innocent Until Proven Sketchy

It can also be hard to spot red flags until there are a bunch of them together.

The thing with red flags is that a lot of them look pink when you see them by themselves.

A lot of sketchy behavior is ambiguous. Each little action on its own looks kind of innocent. And even if they give you an uneasy feeling, it can be hard to run with it when you can’t pinpoint exactly what is causing you to feel wary.

Worse, when you try to tell others why someone is setting you on edge, it often sounds so trivial. As the words are coming out of your mouth, you find yourself thinking, “Wow, I probably sound super paranoid.”

So, instead of going with your gut, you tell yourself the innocent explanation must be the correct one. You keep going along with it.

All those pink flags only start looking red once you’ve seen enough of them — once you’ve noticed a clear pattern emerging.

Depending on how experienced you are at dealing with people’s shit and how overt the asshole you’re dealing with is, it could take hours, days, months, or years before you piece it all together.

Recently, I had someone reach out to me who gave me kind of weird vibes. I felt like he was laying the groundwork for something (what exactly, I don’t know, but something).

First, he reached out with some effusive praise on one of my articles. But he did it as a private message, not as a regular response.

That made me a bit ill at ease. But I had a hard time really understanding why. I mean, private messages are a thing, and he didn’t say anything off color in it.

The private messages kept coming. I ignored them (can’t clap on private messages and I had nothing to say), but had the same odd feeling that I couldn’t fully explain.

Eventually, he gave me some effusive praise and I thanked him. He responded within an hour asking if we could talk off Medium. Ostensibly, it was so we didn’t have to deal with the character limit (though there would have been none if he had just sent me regular responses).

I decided to check out some of his stuff. The first thing that stood out was a very misogynistic article. And then I came across not one but two love letters he wrote to an unnamed Medium writer, each of them with a strong stalker vibe. (I don’t know if they were about me or not, but either way, they were creepy.)

When I told him I didn’t want to move my relationships with my readers off Medium, he made up an excuse and backpedaled. He claimed he was a professional sex coach and only wanted to offer me some advice about my clitoris.

Then, before the day was over, he went back to a post I wrote weeks before called No One Owes You a Chance. He left a lengthy response that implied that women who don’t give him a chance (e.g. me, just earlier) are bitter, angry, heartless bitches.

Yeah, his intentions were totally professional…

At that point, I cut communication with him before he could try to take things further. I blocked him. He deleted his response. And I hope that’ll be the last of it.

Now, given everything I know now — especially those super stalkery posts — it’s clear to me that the private messaging was a red flag. It’s also clear that asking to communicate off Medium is a bit of a red flag here. It’s quite likely he was laying the groundwork for something.

But up until that point, each of those individual actions seemed kind of innocent. Pink flags at best.

And that’s another way women “ignore” red flags — because each of them on their own doesn’t look that bad.

“Not All Men” Men Need to Sit the Fuck Down

There’s one more reason women ignore red flags. We’re constantly being told we should.

One big part of the problem is all the men who cry out “Not All Men” whenever women discuss the shit they deal with.

We have a lot of reasons for sharing our stories — it’s cathartic, it’s healing, and it helps us bond and understand each other.

It’s also a way of issuing warnings.

It’s because we share our bad experiences that we know about fuckboys and how to spot them. Or what to do if our boyfriend turns out to be a narcissist. Or that “Nice Guys” often have a total disregard for our sexual consent.

That shit’s fucking critical.

I didn’t have those kinds of conversations when I was younger and I didn’t have access to them online. So, I ended up in some risky situations, or got too close to guys who deep down did not give a shit about me, because I was figuring it all out on my own.

But now when we finally share our stories so that we can show each other (and clue some guys in) the red flags and pink flags we need to be mindful of, we keep hearing from men who are annoyed that we’re painting them with a broad brush.

Sometimes they don’t say “not all men.” Sometimes, they say that we should give guys a chance even if we feel weird. Sometimes, they say it’s not fair that they get treated like potential rapists just because they were being really forward because damnit they mean well.

But in the end, what they’re doing is telling us not to trust our instincts. They’re telling us that we need to give men the benefit of the doubt. They’re telling us to set aside our gut feelings because following them might mean we’re judging a decent guy too harshly.

And that’s one of the reasons women ignore red flags — because we’re constantly told we should, even when protecting men’s egos puts us at more serious risk.

I’m sure it sucks being treated with suspicion, but there’s a reason we have to be suspicious even if it has nothing to do with you personally. Those guards she’s putting up — the ones that make it trickier for you to interact with her — they might be the only thing keeping her from being abused or having the worst night of her life.

So if you ever feel like a woman is unfairly treating you like a potential threat, understand that she has to put her safety first. She deserves your empathy, not your contempt.

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