Over the past five years, dating has developed a new lingua franca: “red flags.”
Where we once had a thousand ways to describe falling in love, we now have a tight glossary for calling it quits. On TikTok alone, #redflags appears in more than 360 million posts, each a crowdsourced cautionary tale of the little behaviours—bad texting, jealousy, a secret family—that hint at bigger storms ahead.
Yet for all our talk about spotting warning signs, many of us still…

