15 Red Flags in Dating in 2026 – From a Plus-Size Therapist’s Notebook
In the spring of 2021, I was still working as a middle school counselor in Decatur when a colleague I’ll call Asha sat down across from me in the staff lounge with her tuna sandwich and started telling me about a man she had been seeing for six weeks. She was a size 18, brilliant, sharper than anyone on our team. He had told her, on date three, that he had “never been with a bigger girl before” but that he had always found her “type” more interesting. He said she was lucky to have found someone like him, because “most guys wouldn’t see past it.” He said it like a compliment. She heard it like a compliment. I was holding my coffee and feeling my counselor face do what counselor faces do when they are trying not to broadcast alarm.
That staff lounge sentence is most of what I want to talk about. In the five years since, working with plus-size friends and clients, I have heard a version of that opener so many times it sounds like a script. The dating advice industry almost never names it. The “red flag” lists online cover the basics. They do not cover what it looks like to date in a body the culture has decided is conditional.
So this is the list I wish I had handed Asha six weeks earlier. Fifteen patterns, sorted by category, leaning on Gottman, Ramani Durvasula, Esther Perel, and Logan Ury where the research holds. The framing is mine, from eight years sitting across from people whose nervous systems had been telling them what their heads were not ready to admit.
The body flags, the part the standard lists miss
1. “I usually date skinny girls but you’re different.” This sentence, or any cousin of it, is not a compliment. It is a negotiation. He is telling you, in the first five dates, that your body is the thing he is making peace with. He has placed himself above you on a hierarchy you did not agree to. The thing he wants you to feel grateful for is the act of him choosing you in spite of. Choice in spite of is not love. It is a tab he is going to come back and cash.
2. Frequent body comments framed as love language. “I just want you to be healthy.” “Have you thought about trying that gym with me.” “I’m saying this because I care.” Care does not audit your plate. Real care notices that you are tired and asks about your day. The line between concern and control is whether the comment is about your wellbeing or about his comfort with how you look next to him. If you have ever felt the need to stop apologizing for everything in your own relationship, including for eating in front of the person who claims to love you, that is the data.
3. Fetishization presented as preference. There is attraction that finds your specific body beautiful, and there is attraction that finds the category of your body a kink. The tell is whether he can describe what he loves about you as a person without circling back to your size within two sentences. The fetish version is “I love how soft you are” on loop, with no curiosity about your work, your family, or your week. Logan Ury, the Hinge Director of Relationship Science and author of How to Not Die Alone, talks about the difference between “spark” and “slow burn.” Fetishization mimics spark. Six weeks in, if his interest still sits entirely at the surface of your body, that is a structural problem, not a phase.
4. Comments about your eating in front of others. The waiter is at the table. He says, with a smile, “she’ll have the salad, she’s being good tonight.” Or his sister asks if you want dessert and he answers for you. Public comments about your food are not jokes. They are him performing oversight of your body for an audience. It tells you what he thinks the relationship looks like to outside eyes. It also tells you what your next family dinner is going to feel like.
5. The compliment ladder that only activates when you are losing weight. Pay attention to when he tells you that you look beautiful. If the compliments concentrate on the weeks you skip dinner, the months you start a new workout routine, the morning after a stomach bug, you are not in a relationship. You are in a conditioning loop. Beauty that is contingent on shrinking is a wage he pays you for compliance.
The character flags, who he is when he forgets you’re watching
6. The way he talks about his mother, his sister, his ex. Not the content. The texture. Contempt is the giveaway. Dr. John Gottman’s decades of research at The Gottman Institute named contempt the single strongest predictor of divorce in his Four Horsemen framework, alongside criticism, defensiveness, and stonewalling. He wrote about it most clearly in The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work in 1999. The way a man talks about the women who came before you is the way he will talk about you in eighteen months. If his ex is “crazy” and his mother is “exhausting” and his sister is “too much,” you are next in line for one of those nouns.
7. The friend group reveal that never happens. Three months in, you have not met a single friend of his. Not at a bar, not at a birthday, not even on a video call. He has met yours. The standard explanations are “I don’t really have a close group” or “I keep work and personal separate.” Maybe. Or maybe he is keeping you in a compartment because a healthy friend group would tell him exactly what they see, and he does not want that mirror held up. The friend group test is not a vanity check. It is a basic indicator of whether you exist in the documented part of his life.
8. The job, credit, family black box. Six weeks in, you still cannot answer simple factual questions about him. What does he actually do for work day to day. Has he ever filed for bankruptcy. Does he have a kid you do not know about. Is he in contact with his parents and if not, why not. Privacy is fine. Opacity is a strategy. The man with nothing to hide will not feel interrogated by the question “tell me about your last serious relationship.”
9. The waiter test. Watch him with people who cannot do anything for him. If he is courteous to you and rude to the woman at the gate desk, you are watching a performance, not a personality. Esther Perel, in her practice and in Where Should We Begin, talks about the gap between who a person is in courtship and who they become inside the relationship. The courtship version is the marketing campaign. The waiter version is the product.
The communication flags Gottman and Ramani spent careers naming
10. Stonewalling. Gottman’s fourth horseman. You raise a concern, he goes silent, picks up his phone, refuses to engage for hours or days. He calls it “needing space.” Space is a forty-five-minute walk and a return to the conversation. Stonewalling is punishment dressed up as self-regulation. It teaches you, week by week, not to bring up the thing that is bothering you, because the silence is worse than the swallow.
11. Love-bombing followed by withdrawal. Dr. Ramani Durvasula, the clinical psychologist whose 2024 book It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People is the most useful single text on the subject, calls this the “idealize, devalue, discard” cycle. Week one to three he is showing up with flowers and planning a trip in March. Week four to six he is distant, criticizing the way you load the dishwasher. Week seven he is back with flowers. The intermittent reinforcement is the hook. The unpredictability is not a personality quirk. It is the mechanism.
12. The clarifying question that becomes an interrogation. You ask where he was on Friday because something did not add up. He answers, briefly. Two days later he brings it up unprompted, walks you through a forensic explanation, then flips the conversation to challenge how you could have doubted him. By the end you are apologizing for asking. That maneuver has a name. DARVO, deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. Once you see it once, you cannot unsee it.
13. The cold reception when you say no. No to sex on a tired night. No to a weekend with his family you cannot afford. Watch what happens in the forty-eight hours after the no. If the temperature drops, if texts go unanswered, if the next time you see him he is “just in a mood,” you have your answer about whose comfort the relationship is built around. A grown man can hear no without retaliating. The ones who cannot are telling you what the next ten years would look like.
The context flags, the world he places you in
14. Won’t introduce you publicly. No photo of you on his phone home screen, none on his socials, no Saturday brunch with his work friends. He calls it “keeping the relationship private.” Privacy is a choice two people make together. Concealment is a choice one person makes alone. Hinge’s 2024 Annual Dating Report found that visibility consistency in the first six months is one of the strongest correlates of relationships that make it past a year. And in the dating economy, plus-size women are hedged on at a disproportionate rate. The 2024 OkCupid match-rate data showed that women categorized as plus-size receive roughly 30 percent fewer initial responses than the platform average. Christian Rudder’s work on the original OkCupid dataset documented similar patterns over a decade ago. The numbers have not improved.
15. Future-faking that never materializes. Month two he is talking about the apartment you two will get. Month four he is talking about how his mom will love you when she meets you in June. June comes. No plan, no flight, no date on the calendar. He rolls the timeline forward. Logan Ury calls this one of the most reliable warning signs in the six-week window. The honest version of a future plan has a date and a price tag. The dishonest version has a vibe. If six weeks in you cannot point to a single concrete commitment he has made and kept, you are dating his marketing deck, not his roadmap.
The week-six body change test
Here is the question I tell women in my DMs to ask themselves in week six. Not week one. Week six, when the brain has cooled off enough to see the data. If my body changed tomorrow, would the way he speaks to me change. If I gained fifteen pounds in three months because of medication or stress, would the compliments thin out. If I lost twenty pounds, would the volume turn up. Would his hand stay on the small of my back, or would it migrate. Would the photos he does not post start getting posted.
The honest answer is almost always available in week six, if you let it be. It is in the texture of his attention, not the content of his words. Men who love women love the woman, not the silhouette she is currently rendering. The terms of a probationary contract are usually written in the body comments first, then the public comments, then the silences.
Dr. Sue Johnson, the founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy and author of Hold Me Tight, has written for decades that the central question of every romantic attachment is “are you there for me.” Not are you attracted to me, are you there for me. The plus-size lens sharpens that question. Are you there for me, or are you there for the version of me you are negotiating toward. Being in your feminine era, in the way that phrase actually means something, is refusing to be in a relationship that requires you to negotiate the question.
If you are reading this and recognizing your relationship, you do not have to leave on a Tuesday. You do have to start writing things down. Dates, sentences, how you felt in your body after the conversation. Dr. Ramani’s clinical recommendation, which I echo because it works, is to keep a private note on your phone to keep your own memory honest. Memory is the first thing the dynamic erodes. A book that has helped my clients is Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft, the most direct text I have found on the patterns of controlling men. For the boundary work that has to come before the leaving, Set Boundaries, Find Peace by Nedra Glover Tawwab is the clearest book I know.
And then ask the question. If my body changed tomorrow, would the way he speaks to me change. Sit with whatever answer arrives. That answer, not the man, is the relationship.
Asha left him in the fall of 2021. She told me later that what ended it was not the worst thing he had said. It was a Tuesday night, nothing dramatic. He made a face when she ordered the pasta. She watched the face. She paid the bill. She did not go home with him. Sometimes that is what the leaving looks like. Quiet, on a Tuesday, over pasta, after the body finally believed what the head had been hearing.
