Red flags. Warning. Danger. Danger. Danger…

… We women are a generous lot, quick to give the benefit of the doubt when it comes to recognizing and heeding the warnings of red flags. We become especially deaf to their sirens screams if we very much like a particular gentleman and can be swayed from reason with all manor of excuses. Independent women who claim to take charge of their own love lives stating it’s no one’s business but their own really do themselves a major disservice by not enlisting the help of family and friends to keep them grounded during the early stages of a relationship. Those giddy early stages are when we are the most intoxicated and incapable of making good judgments.

Red flags are things that should be setting off inner alarm bells warning you things are not right. These are entirely different from typical “deal breakers”. Deal breakers are typically personal preferences we have about what we want and don’t want in a mate. Many are completely superficial, like only dating men over 6 feet tall, and some not so much, like being annulled if divorced. Deal breakers are obvious, red flags are subtle, which makes them increasingly hard to recognize if we are really attracted to someone. If you become physically intimate too soon, even just kissing, your emotions numb you to these warning signs and the likelihood you’ll ignore them completely because you’re soooo in looooove doubles. No triples. Huh? Warning what? Isn’t he dreamy?

And this silliness isn’t just something young girls do. Women do this all time. All the time. More often, I think, because we are grown and used to making decisions for ourselves. We think we are wiser than our twenty year old self and above a little friendly advice. We imagine we are immune to stupidity since we’ve gained more experience.

OK ladies, will you permit me?

The biggest red flag on the face of the earth is the man who disrespects his mother. Any man who talks ill of his mother and has no relationship with her is a man worth avoiding at all costs.

I know not every mother is perfect and there may be situations were estrangement is justified; like abuse and neglect. But I sincerely think these issues need to be dealt with by him before romantic relationships can develop. He should have these worked out with a professional so at least any residual resentment is being addressed. If he is working out these emotions in a healthy manner under the guidance of a counselor or clergy than there is no reason he should be bad mouthing his mother at the early stages of dating. A man who dislikes his mother is dealing with a lot of anger and you must resist the urge to nurture, fix, or mother him. Don’t mother him, for goodness sake! He hates her, remember?

The relationship a man has with his mother is the very first relationship he had with a woman so this ranks higher on the red flag scale when he bad mouths her as opposed to a man who rants on about his horrible ex-girlfriend or hateful ex-wife. Those are ginormous red flags as well, but the mother red flag is the reddest of all flags so I won’t clump the ex-lover ranter in with the mother hater.

The relationship a man has with his mother is also the measuring stick to which all his relationships with women are held to. And you can not help him. It is not worth sacrificing yourself to even try. People need to come to forgiveness and acceptance on their own, we can not nurse every wound even though God created us with the desire to do so.

It wasn’t until very recently my mother and I began to build a healthy relationship and my resentment towards her reflected in all my relationships with other women. I didn’t like or trust other women and had very few female friends. Because of this I shut myself off from sage advice and guidance like this right here. Any dysfunctional parent-child relationship is a sad thing that stunts the way we emotionally interact with others. When familial relationships are hard life becomes unnecessarily harder. I empathize but I am also in a unique position to state how important it is that those issues need to be resolved before accepting another date.

Because I had such a terrible relationship with my own mother I was quicker to give a free pass to a man who admitted the same. Instead of acknowledging that both of us should probably not be attempting to develop anything romantic at those points in our lives we forged ahead with disastrous results. Commiserating over shared miseries is not building a healthy relationship. Again, commiserating over shared miseries is not building a healthy relationship.

Ladies, it ok to walk away and if any situation demanded such, it would be the man who disrespects his mother.

If being Catholic has taught me anything, its taught me the importance of family.