A man in the LDS Dating Midsingles Facebook group posted a question last month that generated 440 comments, 43 reactions, and no small amount of chaos. The question, accompanied by a graphic, was simple enough: "What is an instant red flag in a woman, no matter how pretty she is?" He added a polite request for the men to be respectful. They mostly tried.
What followed was a sprawling, revealing, occasionally wise, and sometimes painful inventory of what men in this community are actually afraid of when they look across a dinner table at someone new. A septum ring. A liberal. An Adams apple. Being still married. Talking about her ex. Not talking about her ex. Not having female friends. Having too many male friends. Being a Raiders fan.
Some answers were genuinely useful. The comment that rose to 52 reactions did the whole thread a favor by drawing a clean line between preference and red flag. Several men said that cruelty to servers, to animals, to other women, or to an ex-husband in front of his kids was the thing that would end things for them. One man said his biggest concern was the opposite of what you might expect. He said that a woman who is completely submissive, with no personal opinions and no identity beyond making him happy, was a red flag for him. He wanted a partner, not a house servant.
Scott and Laurie read all 440 comments. Here is what they want to say about it.
The Difference Between a Red Flag and a Dealbreaker and a Personal Preference
Scott
The commenter who laid out the preference-versus-red-flag distinction deserved more than 52 reactions. That comment was doing real work in a thread that needed it.
Here is the distinction, as plainly as I can put it. A red flag is a signal that something might be fundamentally broken, in a way that would make a healthy relationship very difficult or impossible. We are talking about patterns of behavior, not aesthetic choices. Dishonesty is a red flag. Inability to take responsibility for anything is a red flag. A history of using her kids as a weapon in a divorce is a red flag. Cruelty to people who can't push back, like a server or an animal, is a red flag.
A preference is what you like. You want someone who shares your politics. You want someone with a more conventional look. You want someone who does not smoke. That is fine. You are allowed to have preferences. But the moment you call a preference a red flag, you are doing two things you probably don't mean to do. You are framing the other person as damaged when she is just different from your ideal. And you are making yourself sound like someone who is going to be very exhausting to date, because everything that doesn't match your mental image becomes a warning sign rather than just a "not my type."
The septum ring comment got three replies debating whether it was a red flag or a preference. It is a preference. Full stop. She is not going to harm you with a nose ring.
Laurie
I want to gently add something to Scott's point. When we collapse the difference between "not what I pictured" and "genuinely dangerous to my wellbeing," we reveal something about ourselves, not about the other person.
If you find yourself generating a list of dozens of red flags, and many of them are appearance-based or about her not fitting a specific mold, the question worth sitting with is this: Am I filtering for safety, or am I filtering for control? Safety is reasonable. You get to want a partner who is honest, emotionally available, and capable of working through conflict without burning the house down. Control is something else. It is the desire to find someone who will not challenge you, surprise you, or require you to grow.
The men in this thread who named things like victim mentality, chronic dishonesty, inability to communicate, and cruelty toward others were pointing at real things. Those are patterns that genuinely predict misery. The men who listed political party affiliation and jewelry were doing something different, even if it didn't feel different to them in the moment.
Both lists showed up. That tells you something about how wide this community's range of self-awareness actually is.
The Political Fault Line
Scott
The comment that said "a liberal" collected 76 reactions and 12 replies, making it the most contested answer in the whole thread. One woman pushed back and said it didn't sound reasonable to rule out all liberals. The man who posted it responded thoughtfully, actually. He said he was not against liberals as people. He said he wanted to share core beliefs and life direction with a spouse, and that in his experience most men in the church are conservative and many women lean left. He framed it as a values-alignment issue, not a condemnation.
I think that is a legitimate thing to name. Shared values matter in a long-term relationship. If one of you believes the role of government, family structure, and social responsibility are deeply tied to your faith commitments, and the other one doesn't share that framework, that is a real source of friction. You are not terrible people for not being compatible. You are just not compatible.
What I would push back on is the idea that "liberal" or "conservative" is a clean enough signal to be a reliable sorting mechanism. Political labels mean different things to different people. Someone can vote one way and live another. And in a community where people are rebuilding after hard endings, a shared hunger for something real and lasting may matter more than any box checked on a ballot.
Laurie
The exchange about politics surfaced something that I think is actually the deeper issue in the whole thread. Midlife dating after divorce or long singlehood brings with it a very understandable desire to just not be hurt again. And one way people protect themselves is by building longer and longer lists of disqualifying criteria. If I can eliminate enough candidates in advance, I won't have to be vulnerable with someone who turns out to be wrong for me.
The problem is that the list never actually protects you. It just delays the vulnerability and sometimes filters out people who would have been genuinely good for you. The commenter who said women who lean politically left are a red flag for him may be right that he needs a partner with aligned values. But "she voted differently than I did" is not the same information as "she and I cannot build a shared life." One is a label. The other requires actually knowing someone.
I am not saying compatibility doesn't matter. It does. I am saying the shortcut of using a political label as a proxy for character is doing a lot of work it was never designed to do.
What the Surprising Answer Tells You
Scott
The comment that said a completely submissive woman is a red flag for him got 43 reactions and nine replies. A lot of people found it surprising. I didn't.
This community grew up in a tradition that, depending on how it was taught and lived in your particular family, could model marriage as a hierarchy rather than a partnership. The husband leads. The wife follows. And many of the people in this group spent years inside marriages that were built on that framework, some of them happily, some of them not.
What this man was saying, clearly and without drama, was that he does not want to recreate a structure where one person carries all the direction and the other person disappears into servitude. He wants a partner. He wants someone who will push back, have opinions, bring her own self to the table. That is not a small thing to name in this community. It takes some self-knowledge to say out loud that the thing you thought you were supposed to want is actually not what you want at all.
If you are a woman reading this who has spent years making yourself smaller in relationships, who has trained yourself not to have opinions or preferences or needs because that felt like the safer strategy: there are men in this group who are specifically looking for someone exactly like you once you stop doing that.
The Ones That Actually Mattered
Laurie
Underneath all the noise in that thread, several people named the things that actually predict whether a relationship will survive contact with real life. How she treats the server. Whether she talks about her exes with bitterness or with clarity. Whether she can take responsibility for her part in something, or whether every story she tells ends with her as the victim of someone else's choices. Whether she has close friendships with other women, which is often a signal about how she relates to people she is not trying to impress. Whether she is still legally married and calling it "just separated."
These are not preferences. These are windows into character, into emotional availability, into whether someone has done any of the work that midlife asks of all of us after things fall apart.
The pattern that showed up most in the wisdom cluster of this thread, the comments that earned quiet agreement rather than argument, was really one question with many faces: Is she still living inside the story of what happened to her, or is she starting to build something new?
That question goes both directions, by the way. It applies to every person doing the asking just as much as to every person being evaluated.
Before You Add Another Item to the List
Laurie
If you are someone who has been single long enough that your list of red flags has grown longer than your list of things you actually want, I want to say something kind and honest to you at the same time.
The list is not the problem. The length of the list is not even the problem. The problem is if the list has quietly become the thing standing between you and the risk of trying again. Because at some point, filtering stops being wisdom and starts being a way of staying safe inside a life that is slowly getting smaller.
You have been through something real. Divorce, or long singlehood, or a faith transition, or some combination of all three, leaves marks. You are allowed to be careful. You are allowed to know yourself well enough to name what you need. But careful and closed are not the same thing, and knowing yourself is not the same as having yourself so thoroughly catalogued that no actual human being could ever pass the intake process.
The most useful thing you can do with any red flag list is ask yourself which items are there because you genuinely cannot build a healthy life with that quality present, and which items are there because you are scared. The first kind, keep them. The second kind, look at them with some compassion and ask what they are really protecting you from.
And when you are ready to go deeper, we will be here.
— Scott & Laurie
Weighing in from the lowest tier of the Celestial Kingdom, where we learned that the longest red flag lists are usually written by people who most need someone to help them feel safe enough to put the pen down.