So I had a relationship with this woman a few years ago. There were many red flags but I ignored them at first because she had so many great qualities. The thing is, red flags don’t go away because you ignore them. Let me note that a person can show red flags as much as an apartment.

I met this woman and we had many things in common, we liked the same restaurants, had the same ideas on religion and honesty. She was intelligent, funny and pretty. She had a good professional job she loved. I was good to go and happy for the opportunity. We went on some dates of the walk/dinner/activity variety. There was some exciting groping and whatnot. Finally she invited me up to her house where she was going to make dinner.

First red flag: the house and its condition. The building had at one time been a beautiful single family house that had been converted into two beautiful condominiums. The contractor must have really liked the building because it was clear that he had put his heart and soul into the design and concept. Except now, some years after she had purchased it, the house was going to wrack and ruin. The grass hadn’t been cut in months or years. The picket fence in the front was collapsing and covered with peeling paint. The building seriously needed a paint job. I looked at this beautiful house with dismay. As I always do in relationships, I consider how I could improve the situation as part of the relationship. It was daunting already. She told me that the other condo was largely absentee and that she and they both agreed to fire the gardener to save money. She spoke of how excellent the place looked at one time but now she acted as if the forlorn condition was beyond her control.

Red Flag 2: No doorbell. I was expected and there was a doorbell button, but it apparently didn’t work. I had to call on my cell phone. “It hasn’t worked for some time,” she said. Why didn’t you get it fixed? Or put in a wireless version? It’s mighty inconvenient, especially when I am carrying packages. Edit: I couldn’t just knock on the door. The apartment was well beyond hearing range of the knock.

Red Flag 3: The first thing you are going to notice when you go in is the smell. Be aware of it. It’s going to be an important part of your life. If the apartment smells of rot, or gas or garbage or whatnot it’s telling you something about the person you’re with - that they have lived with it for so long they don’t even notice it. The thing about smells is that they are evocative. The smell of the domicile is the smell of that person. It is them, their personality. If the smell of their domicile turns you off then you really need to reconsider the relationship.

Red Flag 4: Hoarding. I went into the apartment and it was completely jammed with overstuffed, mismatched furniture of every type and style. All of it was high quality stuff but the apartment was bursting at the seams. It was hard to move around. You do NOT want to be in a relationship with a hoarder. It never, ever gets better. It only gets worse.

Red Flag 5: Pets. If a woman has a cat, that is cute. I have a cat. If a woman has more than three cats, that’s a warning sign. Every cat past two is an increasingly rapid flashing light that you should watch with great seriousness. The term “Crazy Crazy Cat Lady” isn’t just an mnemonic for making Cosmopolitans: it’s a real thing.

Red Flag 6: The pictures on the wall. They were all of her. Here she is on graduation 35 years ago. Here she is with her infant daughter. Here she is winning the Dressage Cup. Here she is on her wedding day. There was other art there, good, interesting and valuable art but the disturbing number of selfies and self-tributes was excessive. How’s your narcissism doing today?

Red Flag 7: The kitchen. Looked like a bomb went off. There was not one inch of counter space anywhere and it was a huge kitchen. Every inch was covered with letters or photos or appliances or gem-gaws, and tea caddies and expensive coffee pots. The sink was filled with dirty dishes. The dishwasher was the receptacle for clean dishes to be used for eating. They never made it from the dishwasher to the cabinets. Grime underneath. Not a place where you want to prepare food.

Red Flag 8: The trash. There was trash. Lots of it. Bags of it. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Many bags were filled with empty wine bottles. What conclusions can you draw? Someone drinks a great deal, or has many people over, or can’t be bothered to take a bag to the trash can on the way down to work in the morning. And empty wine bottles smell after awhile. A bag of them smells really badly.

Red Flag 9: The dinner. She made dinner. It was largely re-heated leftovers with some additional touches. She fancied herself a gourmet cook who could make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear through “food experimentation”. However, one of the things about experiments is that that they often fail and are supposed to lead to some kind of perfection, at least for food, but they rarely did. She had real cooking skill but it was often wasted on failed experiments and near-rancid leftover food.

Red Flag 10: The bathroom. One of the biggest tests of someone is the state of their bathroom. After eating the bad left-over food I needed some R&R in the lavatory. A cursory attempt had been made to wipe it up but the soap-scum in the shower and the build-up of grime everywhere generally made it known that housekeeping was not a high priority here. If you’re going to invite someone to your home, especially for the first time, you want to make sure that at least the bathroom is pristine because this is the newcomer’s only retreat from the stress of being in your house for the first time. They are being friendly and sweet and all the good, polite things you’re supposed to do in someone’s house when you come for the first time of a budding friendship/relationship. The only place they can relax is the bathroom for those 3 - 5 minutes they are in there. It should be clean anyway, but it should be cleaned for their visit specifically. You’re telling them something about you through your actions - or inaction. In general, if you’re going to invite someone to your house for the first time you should be like the “white tornado” and clean the hell out of it. Maybe you think that means you’re hiding your “true self” but maybe it means you respect your guest too.

Red Flag 11: The Roommate. We are making out on the overstuffed Victorian couch in the living room with scented candles burning and lights low. I hear the door rattling. “It’s my roommate,” she says, pulling a blanket over us as the door opens. A woman comes in. She looks at the floor obsequiously. “You know,” my girlfriend lectures her, “It’s after 11. You shouldn’t be out this late. You have college in the morning.” The girl mumbles something, smiles and goes to her room. I’m asking myself, “Are you her mother? Does she pay rent?” It turns out the room mate pays ALOT, a lot more than I would have expected to put up with abuse from another adult.

Red Flag 12: A suspicious idea of privacy. In six months of dating I never once made it into her bedroom. That was her “private sanctuary”. It made me a little nervous. How much does someone trust you if you can’t even go into their bedroom? All the amorous activities took place on the couch where I always had one ear for the rattling doorknob and the embarrassed room mate who looked at the floor and and scurried to her room, or I had to hear, at the key moment, “Don’t get it on the couch! Don’t get it on the couch!”. This is NOT what you want to hear at the penultimate moment of lovemaking. Also what you don’t want to hear at that tender, trembling moment when you are working down the straps of her blouse over her shoulders for the very first time and she looks up at you shyly and says, “I don’t do anal and you can forget about blow jobs.”. There’s a MAJOR red flag when the first thing someone says about sex is what they WON’T do. I began to realize that I hadn’t spent enough time in discussion before getting in this deeply.

Red Flag 13: The books. The books your paramour has on the shelf and lying around tell you things about them. While I can’t stand that execrably written “50 Shades of Gray”, I am guessing you have to put up with it because it’s so ubiquitous. But you would think it might lead to an interesting and provocative discussion. But no. And under it was “The Art of the Deal”. “My parents sent me that,” she said, hurriedly, “They are huge Trump supporters”. As an aside I had had the misfortune of meeting her parents once. Slim, ascetic and ramrod straight, they reminded me exactly of Joseph and Magda Goebbels. For two hours over dinner I listened to them extol the “glorious Trump victory” while I died inside. When he said, “Trump will make those Blacks and Latins) toe the line. Finally.” I could almost see the black and silver swastika at his neck. In my mind I replaced the slurs for Blacks and Latins with the word “Jew”. I wish now I had just gotten up and walked out. She was a Trump supporter too, a cowardly Trump supporter, not capable of standing up and saying what she believed in because she feared ridicule. It was one of the straws the broke the camel’s back. When something important is happening, silence is a lie. If you have to hide enormous parts of yourself from others it should be a signal that something is wrong. Either you’re not being true to yourself or you’re lying to them.

Red Flag 14: The money. You know, when you are first going out, you don’t really discuss finances that much. It’s more personal than sex. The guy buys dinner, maybe flowers and wine and over time you think there will be a balance of payments. And then you talk about it because you’re getting more serious. But, after dinner and lovemaking on the couch, when you’re staggering out the door to your car at 2AM and she kisses you good bye and her last words are, “You owe me $15.47 for the food” then you REALLY, REALLY need to reconsider what the HELL you are doing there in the first place. To the fucking PENNY. Every time.

There’s a corollary of Murphy’s Law that says the more you tinker with something in an attempt to improve it, the sooner you will break it permanently. In the end I was so desperate to be in a relationship that I was twisting myself into all kinds of pretzels to make it work. The thing that finally made me snap was when she chastised me MIGHTILY for asking her to fill the parking meter while I parked the car. She was a bright, fun, decent person to do things with and be with but in the end the complete dissolution and mean-spirited entitlement and penury made it impossible for me to spend even one more minute there. When it was over, all I felt was relief and I was astonished I had been bottling up and repressing all my objections all that time. I slept well that night for the first time in months.