For a long time I treated red flags like a debate I had to win against myself. Someone would do something a little off — cancel last minute for the third time, get weirdly cagey about a normal question, make a joke that didn't sit right — and I'd spend the next hour building the case for why it was fine, actually, probably nothing.
The cancelling was the one I ignored longest. Once is life. Twice is a pattern I decided not to see. By the third time I had a whole explanation ready before he'd even finished apologizing, which in hindsight was the actual problem — I was doing more work to excuse it than he was doing to not repeat it.
"The flag was never really the issue. The issue was how quickly I could talk myself out of noticing it."
The cagey answers were quieter and took longer to name. A normal question — where do you work, what happened with your last relationship — met with something evasive enough that I'd drop it rather than push, telling myself it wasn't my business yet. It's funny how "not my business yet" can stretch to cover almost anything if you let it.
None of this is really about catching people out. It's about noticing the moment I start doing someone else's persuading for them, and treating that moment as information instead of something to explain away. The instinct was almost always right the first time. It just took me a while to stop overruling it.