no what I meant by a red flag is, what are the warning signs you would see in a potential mate that would indicate the relationship would go bad.

I'm embarrassed.
Potential partner red flags would be talks all the time, interrupts, smokes tobacco indoors, no interest in sex, insists on a , hypochondriac, right wing politics, racist. Other than that, I'm pretty tolerant and very interested in peoples' stories.

Totally agree. It depends on what the friends and family are like and also how they treat the new friend or partner. I admit that I am not family-oriented, unlike the vast majority of women my age in my area, not on this site, but on Match. Those women also make a big deal in their profile essays about how big family is to them and it seems like a defensive move on their part to put off guys that don't want to spend either any or more than a little time with their family. I get all that and in my profile essay I make it clear that I am quite willing to do that, just not spend the majority of my time with the woman around her family.

Even that does little good, because you can't force someone to read the words on the screen without adding on all their own baggage, fears, and misinterpretation of what you write. So even tho I don't bother messaging the women who do state they are family-oriented, I still get rejected by 90% of those I message because these women cynically assume that I am unwilling to spend time around their family at all. I have my reasons for not being family-oriented, but it's not something you can effectively address in a profile essay because of what I said above about interpretation. At best it's something you can discuss in trading messages or in person, but only if the other person is open-minded and trusting enough to let you get that far with them.

@TomMcGiverin Yes, you may have to take even that much openness out of your profile and leave it for in-person. So long as you discuss it in the first date or two it doesn't strike me as disingenuous or a waste of anyone's time. More often than not, for whatever reason, you'll go out a couple of times and decide not to take it further. Meantime you've had a couple of nice dinner dates or whatever.

@mordant That's precisely what I am planning to do soon, even tho it feels sort of dishonest, it's better than being pre-emptively rejected by women (due to their cynicism, defensiveness, etc.) before I even get the chance to meet them and discuss it. Women in the Midwest, unlike the coasts, are just so damn less independent from their families that ones on the coasts, at least in my experience. So with them saying you are not family-oriented is like saying you don't believe in God to a Christian. It is like a fucking religion in itself around here, the whole worship of family thing.

@TomMcGiverin It runs in subcultures, too, like Italians for example. I call them BNF's (Big Noisy Families).

I gotta say though, be careful what you wish for. I seem to have stumbled into relationships during my life with women who have fraught relationships with their parents and siblings, and it's not like that takes all that stuff off the table so you don't have to deal with it; it just comes out in other ways. My first wife for example was estranged from her parents but it felt like they were invading every aspect of our lives anyway. I'll take a functional family with ordinary warts any day.

@mordant I hear you. My late wife was a good match because her family was all out East. She was Italian-American too from upstate NY. She was not estranged from her family, but she had good boundaries with them and they did lived so far away that we visited together only once a year. They did not intrude on our lives at all. She was a very independent person who had lots of female friends here. I can't really say how functional a family they were because by the time we met all she had left of her immediate family was her mother and her sister. The mother already had dementia when we met and her sister is a Borderline Personality disorder who I clashed with from the start, as did my wife regularly. Since they both died, I have kept in touch with the sister by phone and we started getting along better after my wife got dementia, out of our mutual concern for my wife.

@TomMcGiverin I took a look at your bio, and I think saying "I'm not very family oriented" is pretty non-specific and could be taken a lot of ways. It sounds like whatever you're trying to get across needs too many words and too much body language and other context for a bio. I'm more sure than ever that you should just drop it from the bio. You don't want perfectly sane people thinking you are going to stop paying attention to them once you're in a relationship or something. It sounds like you just don't want really nosy, intrusive or controlling in-laws and that's pretty normal. Who does.

@mordant My Match profile essay is totally different and much longer than the one I have on here. I did remove all the content on that one about the whole issue of family. As for the one on here, I think most women on here would get what I mean about that, at least the ones living in my area of Iowa, where we are bombarded with tons of propaganda about family friendly activities, family being first, etc. We Agnostics and Atheists are usually not very family connected in the first place, if for no other reason than being non believers and non conformists, so I'm not worried about leaving it on my one here. Women will get it and agree, at least the ones from my area. I have mentioned before in this forum that my hunch is that not having kids as well as being estranged from family is far more common among members of this site than the general population.

In a nutshell, what I mean by not being very family-oriented, directed at the women from my area I am seeking to meet, is that I am not close with my family and that if I am not interested in dating someone who wants to visit their family with me every week or spend my time with them babysitting their grandkids with them regularly or spend most of our time together attending the grandkids ballgames, etc. I'd be glad to visit their family with them once a month or so, but I would rather spend most of our time together just the two of us. I don't want to be joined at the hip with a woman. I want us both to have friends outside the relationship. Yes, there is a lot of words and body language to it, but I bet most Agnostic women are on the same page as me and would get it pretty quickly.

i might have been perceived as being rude to service people. I don't really mean to, I'm just tired and demanding sometimes. All the rest i totally agree with, except chewing gum I don't care.

You nailed it!

i'm already learning from this thread

@Green_eyes

The voice of experience. Thank you.

@SeaGreenEyez Love the feline thumbs up!

for me, I'm not ready to meet friends and family right away. I've been introduced to children on first dates, that made me very uncomfortable. I would like to meet them when we decide to be exclusive, bf/gf.

In the Midwest, where everything is family-centered and most women are not very independent, not being family-oriented or close with your family is always seen as a red flag and/or as a sign of an abuser. Family is like a fucking religion in itself in this part of the country....

if you want to make that thread, go ahead. this is this thread.

Just expressing my opinion...not trying to hijack your thread. @Janiesuper

@nicknotes you didnt hijack because i didnt let you

I have no intention of meddling in this thread past this comment....@Janiesuper

@nicknotes well you can if you can add to the topic