Gary S. Aumiller - Red Flags: How to Know When Youre Dating a Loser

Table of Contents

Got a hot date? Put him to the test. Dont get caught in a relationship with a man who wants to take advantage of you, control you, or reduce your self-esteem to rubble. Before you invest an ounce of energy in a loser, learn to recognize the telltale signs of:

Hell loan you money, fix your car, and make your decisions. Hes a knight looking for a damsel in distress. Escapebefore he slays your pet dragon.

Hell tell you what to wear, what to eat, what to think. Your man is flexibility-challenged. Get deprogrammed.

If hes doing more strutting than a rooster on Viagra, this guys a turkey. Cook his goose.

The pedestal hes put you on is giving you vertigo. Hes so thoughtful, caring, and considerate youre ready to scream. Its time to please yourselfwith someone else.

Hes carrying too much baggage from relationships past and hes on a one-way trip to a cold, cold place of bitterness and resentment. Pack warm. Better yet, get the next plane out.

Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D., is an internationally known lecturer, police consultant, and the author of Keeping It Simple: Sorting Out What Really Matters in Your Life.

Daniel A. Goldfarb, Ph.D., runs a private mental-health center and serves as webmaster to several psychology self-help sites on the Internet. Both authors have served as presidents of the Society of Police and Criminal Psychology. In their collective careers, they have helped more than 4,000 patients solve problems and make better decisions.

To Rebecca Anderson for her beauty, style, character, and love that has brought such joy and inspiration to my life.

G.A.

To Lisa, Judith, and Max Goldfarb; with such a loving and devoted family no man could be a Loser.

D.G.

We would like to thank:

... our women friends and patients, especially Kristine and Regina, who helped us define and refine the application of Red Flags into a dating lifestyle.

... Shiobhan Donohue for her comments and editorial advice on our initial book proposal.

... Lisa Taxman-Goldfarb for her voice of reason when we were off-track.

... Rebecca Anderson for the countless hours of editing, proofreading, suggestions, and encouragement that transformed our psycho-babble into a book.

... our agent, Arielle Eckstut, for her vision, hard work, and patience with our dumb questions throughout the project.

... and, our editor, Deb Brody, for her wonderful direction, insight, and graciousness as she truly handled her work with pure class.

It was probably something sweeta turned smile, a joke told with glorious manner, maybe a moment of compassion for your asphalt-branded knee, or perhaps the offer of half a peanut butter and orange marmalade sandwich when you forgot your lunch. Most of us cant really remember the first time we noticed someone of the opposite sex and felt a tingle, a cell by cell ignition of a pandemonium of feelings telling us that we were in like. Our first crush is enshrined in a pure-bred innocence we were allowed before life forced us to be emotionally mongrel because mongrels survive better in nature. It is understandable that we try to capture shards of that childlike innocence in our adult relationships, opening our lives to people who may stimulate the robust pleasure of loves presence. It is this openness that leaves us unprotected, easy quarry to the predator that lives off the relationship-vulnerablethe Loser.

Inspiring insights can be gained by reading the titles of books aimed at women in the self-help section of any bookstore, before ever reading a page. There are the books aimed at rendering men helpless to the feminine wiles of beauty, social poise, and manipulative persuasion, as if women were trapping men like little chinchillas to be sewn together for a fur coat. Then there are titles on improving bad relationships, gaining intimacy when your partner doesnt want to be in a relationship, understanding male and female differences as if men and women were from two different planets, and books on the parameters of surviving divorce when the planets dont align. All these books are concerned with building a beautiful edifice of a relationship but ignore the simple question needed to pour a foundation: How does a woman know if the man she has is the one she wants?

We all like to make our own choices when it comes to relationships, use our own judgment in choosing a partner. It is a universal navet to believe we are good judges of other people. Combining this navet with the hope of achieving a fantasy relationship is like believing in winning the lottery. We are not the best judges of what is good for us in a relationship; our fantasies are not realistic. The lottery makes money by allowing a few big winners and a lot of losers. In the hands of many women, the act of choosing a man is overly subject to attachment needs, aesthetic appeal, and witty banter perceived as chemistry. When options are shrouded by cryptic illusions, this choice is not calculated but capricious. In the hands of the uninformed, choosing a man will rely on whimsy and folly.

In the course of a dating life, few women experience enough repetition of the many problems of men to actually identify what should be avoided. The feeling of love and the need to be needed color the accurate perception of the person they are with at the time. Some women begin to develop better dating selection parameters later in their courtship careers, after many ego-wrenching relationships, maybe even a divorce or two. Other women never really develop limits and are destined to find themselves in the same situations with the same types of men.

Psychologists working with large numbers of single persons find the repetitive patterns in dating very apparent. Working with both single women and men allows the psychologist to hear both sides of the dating paradigm, the women acting out their fairy-tale fantasies and men acting out their less cerebral motivations. When trying to make a woman healthier in her relationship choices, many therapists try to help women through their own insecurities, and accept that their own issues can cloud their decision making. They use their academic and acquired knowledge of the mental processes of women and the psychology of relationships to enliven natural self-protective functions, intuitions women can use to avoid emotionally destructive connections. The problem is that all the insights women gain about themselves are often worthless in partner selection. It is not that women cant understand themselves, it is that men have learned ways to short-circuit womens intuition, to use womens needs and desires against them when decisions are being made. Women need to be taught about men, not themselves. They need to learn the male tricks, the hidden messages behind male behavior.

Early in any relationship there are signs foretelling of the bad news to come, signs of the short-circuiting male tricks. Many of these signs are obvious, some are less apparent. To the naive, these signs can be justified away, excused so as not to interfere with the fantasy of having met that special guy. To the sophisticated, these signs say: DANGER, DO NOT ENTER, or in modern parlance, DONT GO THERE. These prophetic signs are called Red Flags.