50 Singles Reveal The Red Flag They Shouldn't Have Ignored At The Start Of Their Relationship

50 Singles Reveal The Red Flag They Shouldn’t Have Ignored At The Start Of Their Relationship

If your person displays any of these red flags mentioned on Ask Reddit, RUN.

1. “I’ve cheated on everyone I’ve ever been with. But I won’t cheat on you, you’re different.”

SURPRISE! She cheated on me.

2. Started with him not liking one of my friends. Then it moved to hating all my friends. Then it moved to hating my brother and parents. Then it went even further and transformed into wanting to get me away from them as soon as he could. He even told me once or twice that he’d kidnap me if he had to.

3. He was very proud about how good he was at manipulating people and causing them problems – up to and including costing one person her job. Justified in that he only did it to bad people who deserved it.

The problem was, it was people he determined to be deserving.

4. She was always angry about something. I loved being the person to hear her out and take her side, but soon enough, I was always the person that made her angry.

5. I had to always ask for sex, I chalked it up to him being shy… he was gay.

6. Every ex he had was described as “crazy”. I thought maybe he just had bad taste in women. 2 years later, I found out he was pilfering money from my bank account to do drugs. When I confronted him about it he broke my ribs and then played the victim while stalking me for 3 months.

7. We had a summer job painting and repairing dorm rooms. While we worked, one of us would start singing a song. If he picked the song, we would sing it together. If I picked the song, he would sing a different one on top of me until I switched to his song. This was a perfect metaphor for our entire relationship.

8. Instant gratification that was never enough;

A whole relationship of, “I need this, I REALLY need this” and as soon as she had it (I bought it); she discarded it and moved on to something else shiny she REALLY needed.

9. Unreliability, always had an excuse for everything, and never liked being held accountable.

I tried being understanding and forgiving, thinking I was taking the high road. It increasingly frustrated me until I stopped believing her when she gave her word. It was downhill from there.

Trust is a core pillar of any relationship, and if I could go back in time, I would simply tell myself to never compromise on that belief.

10. He would go on these weird rants about how controlling and unreasonable my parents were for giving me a curfew, wanting to meet him, making sure I had food and money. You know, being parents ’cause I was 17 at the time and still in school.

Guess who turned out to be completely controlling and unreasonable?

11. The swarms of people warning me about the person and how terrible they are.

12. He went into a blind range and threw me against the wall, he bawled, and apologized, over and over, told me how sorry he was. I should have known that wasn’t going to be the only time that happened. I should have left.

13. She had a boyfriend when we started dating, was not aware of this fact, but when I found out i told her to choose him or me. She broke up with him and started dating me. I learned pretty quickly that if a girl cheats with you, she will cheat on you.

14. What I thought was low emotional intelligence and lack of introspection turned out to be a complete lack of empathy and full-fledged covert narcissism.

Came to a head when I found out he’d been having sexually explicit conversations online with women, he said it was no big deal, didn’t have anything to apologize for because “why would anyone get upset about that,” and was utterly incapable of recognizing that what he thinks and feels may, perhaps, be different than what I think and feel.

15. Just that we wanted different things in life. She wanted to move to NYC and I wanted to stay in our sleepy college town near the mountains and the ocean. I think we both thought the other would change their mind, but it didn’t happen.

16. Him and I didn’t have toO many plans. Just I would go hang out with him for the day. It was normal. He got a call from one of his boys to go play some basketball. Which is fine imo, we didn’t have to much going on that day and I didn’t want to yoko.

I was his only ride there and back. I’m okay with this. I told him I would sunbathe and read a book while they played. He can have his boy time. (He knows I love my books.)

I got totally engrossed with the book while they were playing. It had only been an hour and he comes up to me and says I need to take him home.

Okay, no problem. I noticed he was upset but thought it was something do to friends. I was surprised that he left so soon.

Nope, seeing me on the grass and enjoying it made him jealous. The book was more important than him. I was so confused. I mean you can have your girl time and your boy time but when both of them kinda collide, would this be the best scenario?

17. I mean, sure, she has a boyfriend and probably shouldn’t be flirting with me so hard, but you know, that dude treats her like shit and doesn’t realize how lucky he is to have her.

I bet you can’t guess how that relationship ended four years later.

18. She told me in passing that she accidentally burned half of her ex’s kitchen while she was cooking. Didn’t think anything of it until I came home to half of my wardrobe on fire in the back yard. Looking back, I probably should have seen that coming.

19. I guess I must have really took to heart the moral of every fairy tale about how ultimately the best people are being poor and humble, so when I was a teenager and very young adult I just didn’t care if a guy was “between jobs” or had no career goals or whatever.

Guess what, ladies, that’s how you wind up dating guys who you wind up supporting while they sit on the couch and make messes they expect you to clean up.

20. He hated when I wore low-cut shirts because that meant people saw some cleavage. He literally took me to the mall to buy me a belt because he was scared my pants would fall down and people might see something. He got pissed the first time he saw me wear a skirt and tried to make me feel bad for choosing it, because he didn’t think I’d be careful enough to keep my legs closed and people might see up my skirt. I should have fucking ran way earlier than I did. Controlling behavior doesn’t stop over time, it just gets worse.

21. She had anger issues. Oh my word.

Don’t ignore that red flag, unless you want to live with someone who gets annoyed by the sound of an ambulance passing by while you are talking to them on the phone.

22. Dated a guy for about a month when he finally invited me over his place. When I showed up I noticed kids toys and he mentioned he was letting his brother and his wife and their kid stay with him. Nope. It was his brothers house and he was crashing in the spare bedroom. The Audi? Also his brothers. Designer clothes, you guess it…not his! The thing is I’m not even shallow. I wouldn’t have cared if he stayed at his bros, took the subway to work, and wore plain clothing. But why lie?

23. Treated waitresses like trash.

Made outrageous demands of my friends, treated them like servants.

Smoked pot daily, and always tried to hide it.

24. That little details in stories didn’t always add up. Any single one could be easily dismissed or laughed off. But they kept coming, and kept getting harder to ignore.

Turned out she was a compulsive liar. I hope she’s better now. I’m pretty sure the cause of this was being molested by her father (something I later surmised by adding up a bunch of clues) and desperately needing to fabricate her own reality.

25. We had mismatched libidos from the start. I convinced myself things would get better when we were married; I chalked it up to Catholic guilt. He actually became completely disinterested in sex after we got married. He had brushed me off several times while we were dating. He even went so far as to throw me out of the bed once and tell me to “take care of it myself” on more than one occasion. The signs were all there. I just ignored it.

26. Guy used to try to get my attention with little puzzles. Don’t judge him, I was into it. Also this was years ago at school and we didn’t have all you kids’ fancy shit.

So he sent over a hangman.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

It took me a while to get it for some reason despite all the vowels. The word was ‘Oedipus’.

I was his girlfriend for 4 years. I don’t know how I ever managed to ignore all the weird shit with his mum. He warned me, kind of.

27. Her habitual abuse of my wallet. She’d come to me for little things at first like her rent being due and she need a tenner or twenty to make it through the week. Some small cash for groceries or bus fare to school or an appointment. This would go from once a month to in the end multiple times a week. She’d always tell some sob story till I gave in. Later found out she always had the money, in fact she had plenty in the bank, she just didn’t want to spend her cause she was saving up for a wild party vacation with her (as it turned out not so gay) male friend.

28. Everyone in her life/past was a terrible person and screwed her over somehow.

Yeeeah, turns out she was the problem.

29. My ex would get upset with me over any contact I had with other guys, every conversation I had I needed to tell him about so he could make sure I wasn’t flirting. It was very cleverly done because he was subtle at first (definitely got scary worse after a while) and anything that I pointed out he chalked up to PTSD and being cheated on in the past.

Also he frequently bragged about having no empathy. That in itself should’ve been my “get out quick” indicator, but I had low self esteem and stuck around.

30. He liked to drink. I mean cool I like to drink too, but whenever he drinks, he drinks a lot like he’s always drunk whenever we drink. I always ended up looking after him like I’m some kind of babysitter.

31. Little lies are really significant. If someone lies about things that are really unimportant, it’s a red flag. I had an ex lie to someone about a situation we were both in together. I didn’t say anything at the time, but I planned my exit at that moment.

32. Clinginess.

Dude got legit upset whenever I had to go to work or whenever I had a prior engagement with friends. I’m talking ‘acting like you’re actually trying to neglect me instead of taking care of actual needs’ levels of upset. Like, ‘gets moody and passive aggressive because you won’t be on the phone responding immediately all the time’.

Also he proposed to me within a few months of us even knowing each other.

We’re friends, now, but with a healthy level of distance.

33. My ex didn’t like my dog. And my dog didn’t like him. Looking back, that was the first red flag I dismissed.

34. My ex-slammed the door in the face of a delivery person because he was taking too long to double check the order. I was appalled of course but didn’t think it was a big enough deal to break up with him. What I should have learned was that if he treats one person that way, he’s liable to treat those closest to him that way as well.

35. Boyfriend literally made a joke about how much he drinks on our first date.

Two years later, we realize he’s a severe alcoholic.

36. My ex husband lied constantly and was so proud of himself for pulling it off. Late for work? Took pictures off the internet of a fender bender and claimed it was him. Didn’t want to hang out with a friend? Comes up with some insane story about a sudden death in the family to get out of it last minute. Could not believe it when I just straight up told people I didn’t want to do something instead of coming up with some story to cover. We were together for ten years and when he started lying to me I noticed pretty fast, but I always thought I should have seen the warning signs.

37. He bragged that he was going to be a great lawyer as he was good at manipulating people.

He gaslit me for well over a year whilst cheating on me. Jokes on him, he flunked law school in the end.

38. Always had to be right even when wrong. Correcting me on absolutely everything to the letter and being offended when I did the same. Thought it was just competitive spirit, realized it was toxic later.

39. He always expected me to take care of things. At first I didn’t mind paying for meals and driving him around occasionally, but it got old real fast when I was also paying for his phone and our apartment.

40. The drinking. I enjoy a drink or several regularly however my ex took drinking to a higher level than I knew possible. The Red Flag was coming home to find her drinking Vodka and grape jelly. She had run out of mixers.

41. His anger issues. It started out as just him holding grudges against past friends, to getting worked up over football games, but then slowly turned into him hating my friends and family, and eventually towards me. I’m honestly lucky I wised up and left when I did, I don’t think it would have been much longer before he got physically abusive.

42. Her buying me tons of stuff and paying for things, including renting me a car when I didn’t have one so I could drive to her place, was a huge red flag that she wanted to control me. But I liked all the free stuff and she gave good blowjobs so I went in even deeper with her. Turns out, yep, she wanted to control me. A few months in she started talking about wanting to “fix” me. The obsessive behavior and the lies, my god the lies (I’m pregnant, I have cancer, etc) just got bigger and bigger.

43. He showed me pictures of his ex fiancé naked in a tub and told me “well they ARE nice pictures, right?”

I just kinda nodded and looked away. I feel so stupid for not breaking up with him at that moment.

44. He would get mad if I hadn’t seen his favorite movies. Not just like “I can’t believe you haven’t seen movie!!!” Like genuinely upset and he’d make me promise I’d watch it as if it were a condition of our being together.

The same guy told me that I’d be exactly his type of I dyed my hair black. He told me that 3 months into already dating. I knew it wasn’t optional to comply.

45. He hated his parents. This red flag is actually more of a grey flag based on a person’s reasons for said hatred. In my case, my ex hated his parents for stifling him, even though he lived off of them and relied on them to cater to his every whim. I thought it was so inspirational that he wasn’t someone who could be controlled, but later it spiraled into him turning that anger towards me. It did not end well.

46. I wasn’t the type that she normally went for. She preferred tall, white, lanky guys with blond curly hair. I’m short-ish, mixed blood brown, more stocky than lanky, and have dark wavy hair.

She continued to fawn over these preferred guys even when we were together for years. Also, we had hobbies that didn’t really overlap. I supported her in her things but she seemed indifferent to my things.

Turns out that she never really wanted me for me. I was an convenient escape from her family life. When I gave her that escape in the form of moving with her 200 miles away from them she no longer needed me. She no longer needed what I represented because her family wasn’t there to give her hell every day anymore.

She pulled away slowly more and more while I was left trying to figure out what was wrong. By this point we were together for 7 years and in the middle of planning a wedding.

She started cheating on me with, who else, but a guy is fits her preferences exactly. Also this guy was 8 years older, unemployed, no degree, no job training, and MARRIED. She knew that he was married. He knew that she was engaged. They knowingly were cheating together.

She only fessed up after I caught them together.

Seven years of my life, stolen.

47. That she didn’t clean up after herself. I didn’t realize this would be a lifelong annoyance but my wife literally won’t clean. She is 100% content sitting on the couch watching her shows while I clean. She hasn’t washed a dish since 2011.

48. He worked as a dispatcher at a police station. Never saw a problem with breaking small laws like speeding because he “knew the officers”. Years later he is in federal prison because he “knew people” and didn’t think he’d get in trouble.

49. Almost all his exes apparently were crazy…

50. For the first 2 months we dated, any time I suggested going to his place instead of mine, there was always some reason why he couldn’t do it.

Eventually discovered that he was a hoarder. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

January Nelson is a writer, editor, and dreamer. She writes about astrology, games, love, relationships, and entertainment. January graduated with an English and Literature degree from Columbia University.