Red flags. We see them. We ignore them.

As someone who is notorious for doing this, I’d like to take a deeper look and figure out why a lot of us ignore red flags from those we like and continue to chase them. If you were to look at how they treat you rationally, you would clearly see this person is unavailable. We become so blinded by our feelings that we make excuses for their behaviour. While this isn’t technically a dating game we play with others, I’d still argue that it’s a dating game we play with ourselves by tricking our minds into thinking that this individual is actually worth our time and investment. This is also the hardest dating game to win at since it’s not easy to process the red flags this individual is sending you due to your mind being clouded by your emotions and how you feel. I find there’s usually two scenarios of why you choose to continue to pursue this person:

Filling A Void

We all have an idea of what our perfect partner should be, the traits they possess, and how this person should fit into our lives. I would even bet that most of us strive to end up in a fairytale relationship full of love and success. The problem is, some of us are so desperate to find this person and get that dream relationship straight out of the movies that we start to lie to ourselves about someone’s true character. People treat us poorly and we just blame it on some excuse in hopes they change because we so badly want it to work out with them. I’ve done this with a lot of my exes in the past. I’ve been so hung up on not being lonely that I settled for being walked all over and treated like shit because I justified in my head that they were going through X,Y,Z and they normally wouldn’t treat me like this. The reality was, they just weren’t respecting me and my tolerance for this type of behaviour should have been a lot shorter. Unfortunately, my fear of ending up alone made it easy to ignore these red flags and try to tell myself and my friends why they were still worth my time.

There’s also another scenario where someone doesn’t actually treat you badly at all… they just aren’t the person you think they are. You’ve set some crazy expectation in your head of what you want and who you deserve. but aren’t willing to admit that you either need to change those expectations, or find someone else who fits the bill. Again, I’ve been a culprit of doing this with some of the women I’ve dated in the past. A perfect example was a girl that I had dated from Toronto back in 2018… we hit it off over the holidays in 2017 and ended up talking almost every day into the new year. She eventually took the plunge and flew to LA in February to spend half a week with me, and it was on that trip that I had asked her to be my girlfriend and get into a long distance relationship. Here’s the problem… while that all seems great and we already had the movie-esque love story starting, our values just didn’t match up. She wanted to have children and be married within the next 3-5 years so she could be a stay-at-home mother, and I was (and still am) focused on my career where I couldn’t picture having to raise another human being. While I certainly want to get married, I’m also on the fence about having kids at this point. I’m not 100% opposed to the idea in the future, but again, this is something that I can’t picture doing anytime soon as I’m so involved in developing my career and dedicate a lot of my time in doing so. This should have been a huge red flag that short term we may be a great match, but longer term were definitely were due to have problems. We ended up dating another two months before she ghosted me and ended the relationship, in which I continued to chase her in an attempt to win her back because I thought that she was who I needed to end up with. Looking back, it’s probably good that our relationship only lasted 3 months because I was forcing her to fit into what I thought I wanted out of a girlfriend but she was not that person in reality. She could probably say the same about me now that she’s engaged and gave birth to her first child (which I am beyond happy for her to have achieved).

The Chase

As much as there are individuals who love being chased, there’s also people who love to chase too. When someone isn’t returning our efforts, we want what we can’t have. Some people allow their egos to view this as a challenge, and take it upon themselves to try and win this person over by any means necessary. There’s also people (myself included) who have some sort of expectations set out in their head that this person isn’t meeting, and we therefor view them as ‘broken’. We then want to save this individual. We want to change them. Basically, we get to play pretend superhero’s and take a chance at rescuing this person despite them never actually asking for it. I’m not entirely sure what the chances of a successful relationship spawning out of this are as there’s two ways that I see this going:

A) This person continues to ignore your advances, and you either try harder but get nowhere or eventually give up.
B) You do somehow convince this person that you are worth their time and energy, but then your challenge is over and you realize that you don’t like them as much as you thought you did and ultimately move on.

Either way, we need to check our egos and stop wanting what we can’t have for the sake of it. It’s difficult to think rationally when you have emotions clouding your brain, but I do implore you to try your best to think about whether you actually care for this person and do think there’s a chance things will work out or whether you are just playing another dating game which is preventing you from actually spending time to find someone who will matter. It sounds corny but I’ve actually found it quite helpful to write out pros & cons of individuals that I am dating (or you can write out things you like & don’t like) and evaluate if they have any deal breakers that I know will not be a recipe for success in the long term. Don’t try to mold someone into who you want them to be. Accept them (or don’t) for who they are, and figure out their place in your life after that.