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The Field Guide

This is the educational core of Red Flag Run, readable without playing a single run: the everyday red flags worth naming, what healthy “green flag” behaviour looks like, the relationship science with actual receipts, how to fix the profile and chat habits that keep good matches away (the fish photo knows what it did), a first-date playbook — and, at the serious end, the personal-safety tells and romance-scam scripts to recognise on sight. Everything below describes behaviours and scripts — never a gender, an age, or a group. Time-wasters and scammers come in every flavour.

One heads-up for players: the run’s everyday behaviour chips are deliberately not listed here. Meeting a fresh red flag at speed — and reading its field note on the death screen — is half the game. The scam and safety patterns below are the exception: those are worth knowing cold, spoilers be damned.

Deep dives

This page is the map. For the patterns people actually search at 1am, there are full articles — each one standalone, sourced, and considerably calmer than the situation that brought you to it:

Slang decoder

If it keeps happening to millions of people, it gets a name. Learn the names, skip the reruns. This is the short list — the full 27-term decoder goes deeper on all of it. (The vanishing-flavoured ones — ghosting, orbiting, benching and friends — get a full decoded article, and love bombing gets its own timeline.)

Manipulation, decoded

The heavier everyday patterns are about the upper hand. The vocabulary helps here too, because a pattern you can name is a pattern you can stop taking personally.

None of this is a diagnosis of anyone you’re dating — single moments happen to decent people on bad days. Patterns are the flag: the same move, repeated, whenever it wins.

Green flags: what good looks like

The point of dodging red flags is having room for these. They are boring on purpose — consistency is the whole trick — and every one is also an instruction: be this, too. (Why the boring signals win, with the research receipts: the green flags deep dive.)

What actually predicts it working

Dating advice is mostly vibes, so here is the part with receipts. Decades of relationship research — most famously John Gottman’s lab, which watched thousands of couples argue and then checked back years later — keeps landing on the same handful of signals. None of them are about chemistry. All of them are about behaviour, which is excellent news, because behaviour is learnable.

Attachment styles, in five minutes

The most useful self-knowledge in dating is how you handle closeness under stress. Attachment research sorts it into three everyday patterns (plus blends). None of them is a life sentence — “earned security” is the well-documented upgrade path. (The long version, including how to date each style: the attachment-styles deep dive.)

The classic failure mode is the anxious–avoidant loop: one person pursues harder, which makes the other retreat further, which triggers more pursuit. Both walk away convinced they’re “too much” or “not built for this”. Neither is true — it’s two alarm systems feeding each other. The exits: name the loop out loud, pursue less and say more, or pick partners whose default is secure. One quiet consolation from the research: secure people pair off and stay paired, so the apps skew avoidant over time. If everyone you meet “pulls away”, that’s the pool, not proof about you.

First-Date Playbook

You got the calendar entry. From here the game is presence, not performance. (The safety half of this list — venue, transport, check-ins, exit scripts — is expanded in the first-date safety checklist; what to actually talk about is the first-date questions menu.)

Profile Clinic

Get more (and better) matches by fixing the profile, not the standards. (The long-form version, with the reasoning behind every rule: the full profile clinic.)

Chat Playbook

From match to an actual calendar entry, without games on either side.

Romance scams: the scripts

Now the serious end. Romance scams are industrial, not personal — most run on a script (the FTC and FBI publish the same patterns year after year), and the script has tells. The scale is real: US consumers reported $1.16 billion lost to romance scams in the first nine months of 2025 alone, with a median hit around $2,020 — and most victims never report at all. Here is the full set the game trains, each with the way it looks in a real chat and the counter-move in green. For the whole arc in order — approach, mirror, moat, soak, ask — read the anatomy of a romance scam; for the deepfake and voice-clone upgrades, the AI-era guide.

The money rules that beat every variant: never send money, gift cards, crypto, or “investment top-ups” to someone you have not met in person — and the more urgent the story, the harder that rule applies. Get on a live video call early. Keep the conversation inside the app until you have actually met; moderation is exactly what scammers are fleeing. And reverse-image search photos that look like a catalogue — just know that AI-generated faces pass that test, so check the details too (ears, teeth, and jewellery melt first).

Personal-safety tells

Separate from money scams, a few patterns are about physical and psychological safety. These four are always worth taking seriously, however charming the rest of the chat is.

The first-meet routine that costs nothing: public place, daytime if you can get it, your own transport there and back, and a friend who knows where you are and when to expect a check-in. That’s not paranoia; that’s just wearing the seatbelt. The full routine lives in the first-date safety checklist — and if the threat is about intimate images, go straight to the sextortion playbook: never pay, report, tell one person.

Think you’re mid-scam right now?

No shame in it — these scripts are rehearsed on thousands of people. Do this, in order:

  1. Stop the money. Send nothing more — not “one last fee”, not shipping, not taxes on winnings. Every payment funds the next ask.
  2. Keep the receipts. Screenshot the profile, the chat, and any payment details before they delete the account. You will want them for reports.
  3. Tell your bank or payment app immediately if any money moved — recalls and freezes are time-critical, and fast reporting is sometimes the difference between recovered and gone.
  4. Report in-app, then block. You are not being dramatic; you are protecting the next person on their list.
  5. Report it to the authorities. In the US: reportfraud.ftc.gov and ic3.gov. In the UK: Action Fraud. Elsewhere, your national consumer-protection or cybercrime agency takes these reports too.
  6. If intimate images are involved (sextortion): do not pay — paying invites more demands, not deletion. Report to the platform and the agencies above; StopNCII.org can help block images from spreading, and Take It Down does the same for anyone under 18.
  7. Ignore the “recovery agent” who conveniently DMs you afterwards offering to get your money back for a fee. That is the second act of the same scam.

A note on the advice

Red Flag Run is entertainment with a helpful streak, not professional counselling, legal advice, or a safety guarantee. The guidance here is general and deliberately light — it names behaviours and scam patterns, never people or groups. Trust your instincts, and if a situation feels unsafe, step back and reach for real-world support.