Flags In The Dating Pool

You've heard the expression. Don't pee in the dating pool. The idea being: don't be the one who ruins it for everyone else. Show up decent. Don't lie. Don't waste people's time. Don't be the reason someone swears off dating for six months.

Good advice. Genuinely.

But here's what nobody talks about: the pool is already contaminated. And it's not pee you need to worry about — it's flags. Red ones, mostly. A few yellows. The occasional green one that makes you wonder if you're reading the water wrong.

The dating pool isn't just a place where two people decide if they like each other. It's a place where patterns show up. Where behavior — past, unresolved, repeated — gets brought in from every previous relationship someone never fully processed. Where the charming ones and the careful ones and the ones who've never once looked inward all swim together, and you can't always tell who's who until you're already in the water.

This one's for Denim Record Co. — because "Pee In The Dating Pool" deserved a full breakdown. Give it a listen first.

What's Actually Floating in the Dating Pool

Let's name what's really in there. Because if you've been dating for any length of time, you've run into most of this.

The Red Flags

These are the ones that contaminate everything. The behaviors that, if you saw them on day one with total clarity, you'd have turned around before you even got in the water. The problem is they don't always show up on day one. They show up at month two, when you're already invested. At month four, when you've already introduced them to a friend. At month eight, when ending it feels like a loss even though staying is worse.

Red flags are patterns. Not moods, not rough patches, not him having a hard week. A red flag is something that shows up consistently, in the same direction, for the same reasons, every time. It's the way he handles accountability — which is to say, he doesn't. It's the way his stories about his exes always end the same way, with him as the wronged party and her as the problem. It's the way he's always almost ready — for commitment, for clarity, for something more than what you currently have.

Red flags don't improve with time. They get more familiar. That's not the same thing.

The Yellow Flags

Yellow flags are the ones that don't disqualify someone outright but deserve more than a pass. He's inconsistent with communication — not ghosting, just unreliable in a specific way. He talks about his ex more than feels comfortable. He's a little too focused on what you bring to the table financially. He deflects when things get emotionally real.

None of these are automatic dealbreakers. But they're not nothing. A yellow flag is a signal to pay attention, not to explain away. The dating pool is full of people who turned yellow flags into red ones by staying long enough to watch them deepen.

The Green Flags

They exist. They're just quieter than the red ones, which is part of why people miss them. A green flag isn't flowers and grand gestures — that's often love bombing wearing a green costume. A real green flag is consistency. It's the way he follows through on small things without being reminded. The way he talks about his past relationships with some ownership of what went wrong on his end. The way he makes space for your opinions instead of managing them. The way you feel after spending time with him — lighter, not heavier.

Green flags feel boring to people who are used to the adrenaline of red. That's worth sitting with.

The Flags You've Been Swimming Past

Here's the uncomfortable part of any honest conversation about the dating pool: you brought flags in too.

Not because you're a bad person. Because everyone carries something. The question is whether what you're carrying is something you're aware of, something you're working on, or something you've been bringing into every relationship since 2019 without ever examining it.

The person who exits at the first sign of anything hard because they've been hurt before — that's a flag. The person who needs constant reassurance but hasn't said that out loud to anyone they're dating — that's a flag. The person who picks unavailable people because available ones feel suffocating — that's a flag that keeps generating more flags.

The dating pool gets cleaner when the people in it are honest about what they brought in.

The People Who Pee in the Pool

Let's give this metaphor its full due. The people who actually pee in the dating pool — who contaminate it for everyone who comes after them — are a specific type.

They're not the ones who have red flags and don't know it. They're the ones who know exactly what they're doing and do it anyway. The ones who start a relationship with no intention of committing and string it along for a year. The ones who love bomb until the other person is invested and then pull away. The ones who cycle through relationships looking for what they can get rather than what they can build. The ones who, when it ends, leave the other person questioning their own read of everything that happened.

Those people exist. They are in the pool. The love bombers, the placeholder keepers, the ones waving a Rust Flag — still living in a version of themselves that stopped growing years ago — and the ones carrying a Pearl Flag, beautiful on the surface and built entirely around something unresolved underneath.

You can't remove them from the pool. But you can learn to spot them before you're swimming next to them for two years.

How to Read the Water Before You Get In

The dating pool isn't going to get perfectly clean anytime soon. But you don't have to go in blind.

Reading flags early — in the first few conversations, the first few dates, the way someone presents themselves before they're trying to impress you — is a skill. And like any skill, it gets sharper with practice and the right framework.

The ProfileFlags scanner reads the behavioral signals in a dating profile before the first message is sent. It tells you what those signals mean and what to watch for. Think of it as testing the water before you dive in.

And if you want a deeper read on what to look for once you're already talking to someone, 100 Real-Life Red Flags covers the patterns that show up most often — risk-scored and specific, with response scripts for when you spot one. $12.99 on Gumroad.

The pool's going to have flags in it. That's just the reality of dating people who are, like you, carrying something. The goal isn't a perfect pool. The goal is knowing how to read what's in the water before it becomes your problem to clean up.

"Pee In The Dating Pool" is available now from Denim Record Co. on all major streaming platforms.