A warning up front: I'm about to explain a slightly complicated point. If you wanted something light with your morning coffee, this isn't your read — skipping is allowed and even encouraged.
Back to business: there are no "red lines" in a relationship. There is a red line.
What do I mean?
I keep running into posts that list "the signs" that your relationship is bad for you — inventories of "if she did such-and-such, that's a red line," or "if he doesn't see you and hear you every fifteen seconds, walk away."
And I ask myself: have the people broadcasting these impossible requirement lists ever walked past a real relationship? Actually peeked inside an ordinary, weekday one?
Since I encounter a lot of relationships (psychologist and all that), I can announce festively: I have met a great many women and men in basically stable, good partnerships who violate these unreasonable standards every Monday and Thursday — and sometimes on Sunday and Tuesday too.
And do you know what happens to them when they meet the righteous messaging online? They become ashamed of their relationship. They lower their heads and feel something must be wrong with them. And they are almost always good, decent people.
In my eyes they have nothing to be ashamed of. They are the genuinely brave ones. They are fighting for a real relationship in a world busy listing "what not," without sparing half a minute to clarify what YES.
Here is the complicated point, so read slowly:
In a world where there are fourteen signs that your relationship is bad for you, there is no clarity. There is chaos.
In a universe with twenty-two red lines, no line is prominent, clear, and frightening enough to actually guard. Those lines fade, at best, into a weak pink — and who cares about pink lines?
And that unrealistic ocean of advice, whatever its good intentions, blurs and camouflages the danger that truly exists: that someone is physically threatening someone's safety inside a relationship.
Because that is a real red line.
I didn't come to hurt anyone. I wish you a real relationship, and relief from loneliness. Guard the one line that matters — and give the other twenty-one back to the internet.