Believe Them the First Time: Red Flags, Self-Trust, and Choosing Yourself

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Speaker 1 – Host: Jennifer Elizabeth Masters. She identifies herself at the beginning of the program as the host. The automated transcript initially renders her surname as “Basters,” but later gives the website name “Jennifer Elizabeth Masters,” making “Masters” the clear intended surname.

Speaker 2 – Unidentified Opening Voice / Possible Prerecorded Lyric: The standalone opening phrase “I don’t have to hide” occurs immediately before the host’s welcome. The transcript does not establish whether this is the host, a song lyric, or another prerecorded voice, so it is kept separate rather than assigned an identity.

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Speaker 2 – Unidentified Opening Voice / Possible Prerecorded Lyric: I don’t have to hide.

Speaker 1 – Host: Welcome, welcome. I’m so glad you’re here.

I’m Jennifer Elizabeth Masters, and I’m your host for the next hour. This is SOS for the Soul: Coming Home.

Tonight, we’re talking about one of my favorite subjects: red flags.

We see them everywhere—in a photo on a dating site, maybe in somebody we just met at a party, or in a candidate we’re about to hire. Perhaps someone, somewhere, doesn’t feel quite right, and we have a sense about it, a gut instinct.

And more often than not, what do we do? We shove those feelings away.

So I’ve got some really juicy stories to talk to you about. Some are personal. Some are about clients of mine and people I’ve known over the years who had these red flags show up and went for it anyway—just like me.

Here’s what I want to say about red flags: they’re not a parade. We may see them waving, but we’re supposed to pay attention when we get that gut feeling.

First, I told you last week that I was going to share my own personal story—my trifecta. I can laugh about this now because I’ve really processed a lot of it. It’s been since 2010, when this ended.

So here’s my trifecta story.

What’s a trifecta? Well, if you know anything about horse racing, it’s three things, three wins. In this case, it was three things this man was hiding, and I saw the first one before I even spoke the first word to him.

Why am I telling you about this? Because you may recognize yourself in this in some way.

Secondly, I’m going to talk to you about a woman I’ve worked with and a pattern she saw so clearly that she named its origin in her childhood, and she still couldn’t act on it.

And third, I’m going to teach you exactly what to do differently: how to interview people in your life the way you’d interview anyone else you were about to trust with something important—like your heart, your money, or your body—and how to believe people the very first time when they tell you who they are.

Because people do tell you who they are right off the bat, and usually we go, “Nah, they didn’t mean that.”

By the end of tonight, you’ll walk away with one sentence that you can repeat, and it could save you years of your life and heartache.

So let’s begin.

Back in 2009—for some of you, that was a long time ago—I was on a dating site. I’d given up on one app and moved to another, and I was like, “Yeah, this is the one. It feels right.” It wasn’t Tinder. It wasn’t Plenty of Fish. It just felt better.

I was dating on this site, looking at pictures, and I saw this gentleman. The photo was taken from a far distance away. He had sunglasses on and a big hat that covered his face.

I remember looking at him and thinking, “Oh, he’s hiding something.”

I didn’t know what. I just knew he was hiding something, and maybe that made him mysterious to me.

But guess what? I went for it anyway.

If you’ve ever had that kind of an experience where someone has sunglasses on, you can’t see their eyes, you can’t see their face, and then you meet them and they don’t look anything like their profile, you know what I’m talking about.

That’s what this is about tonight—not the signs we couldn’t possibly have known. This is about the signs we saw, felt, and named, and then explained away.

The red flags were right there.

I’m going to tell you: if you don’t notice the red flags and act early on, it could cost you. It could cost you your heart. It could cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars, as it has me and some of my friends.

So this is really important information.

I want to start with myself because I never ask you to do anything I haven’t first done myself—multiple times.

The man in that photograph, I’ll just call him Jackie, came into my life fast—maybe too fast.

He was charming, handsome, attentive, fit, and in an all-fired hurry.

I was living on a seven-acre farm at the time. I had a fabulous view of Alpharetta. I had a landscaping business that was viable, and I was making good money. I built this company with my own hands, Heaven’s Scapes Limited. I loved that company. My kids alternately worked with me.

Anyway, I dated him and, like I said, he was in an all-fired rush to get married.

Part of me was like, “Wow, he’s choosing me. Oh, he loves me so much. He’s choosing me.”

But the way I’m saying that, I know you know there’s something coming here, right?

Within weeks of him moving in, my barn—where all my landscaping equipment was—changed completely. I had a $10,000 mower. I had all kinds of rakes. I had three little mowers, three blowers, and all kinds of equipment.

He moved all my stuff into the back closet of the barn, where I had to step over his motorcycles, his three bicycles, and his snowboard gear to get to the stuff I needed every day.

Red flag, right? Absolutely.

What does that mean? He didn’t value me or what I was doing. I should have seen it then.

But here’s what I know now that I didn’t know then: what feels familiar is more compelling than what is healthy.

By the time I understood what I’d actually walked into, I found three things about him, one after the other.

You ready for this?

He’d concealed alcoholism. He was hiding his beer bottles in the barn.

He concealed important aspects of himself.

Biggest of all, he concealed his sexual orientation and, with it, a fundamental incompatibility that no amount of love was ever going to resolve.

I know I’m not the only one because I’ve had this conversation with multiple women, typically over 50. So if you are one of those, we need to talk. And yes, I can help you.

The other major thing he concealed was a pattern of controlling, low-empathy, argumentative, blaming behavior and a refusal to take responsibility.

Does this sound familiar?

He displayed narcissistic, controlling behavior. I’d seen it clearly. I had a mother, remember? This was not my first rodeo.

So it felt familiar to me—kind of like home.

And I want to be precise here because this matters. Being gay was not the red flag. Concealing something that fundamentally affected our marriage and my ability to make an informed choice about my life was the red flag.

I have clients who are gay, lesbian, and straight. I work with all types of people. I have no judgment here about that. That is not what this is about.

He also had a dog.

“Oh, the dog is going to be fine with your cats.”

The dog nearly killed one of my cats. One of them ended up going up a 40-foot tree and was up there for days because of his dog. Then my other cat started urinating in the front hall from the stress.

My own animals were trying to tell me something I wouldn’t tell myself.

Here’s the thread connecting everything: the rush. Jackie was in a hurry to get married. Not me. I wasn’t looking to get married at all.

But here’s the truth underneath all of that: him wanting me so badly, so fast, felt good.

Being chosen felt good.

It felt good in a way that bypassed every ounce of good judgment I had because I spent years being rejected by my own mother.

If you’ve had a parent who had these characteristics, you can understand what I’m talking about.

When someone finally pursues you that hard, that eagerly, it can feel like the evidence you’ve been waiting for, wanting. That can be so relieving, so long-awaited, that you stop asking yourself, “Why are they in such a hurry in the first place?”

What would slowing down have revealed if I’d let myself wait like I really wanted to, instead of listening to his urgency?

I questioned the wound my own mother had left open my whole life.

What did I really sense underneath how good it felt to be chosen? What did I tell myself so I could keep going instead of stopping to look?

Someone else’s urgency can outrun your discernment, especially when that urgency is answering an old wound you didn’t even know was still open.

Not always on purpose. Sometimes they don’t even know they’re doing it either, but the effect is the same.

When someone else is moving fast enough and it feels good enough, you don’t get the space to ask the questions that would show you the truth.

There’s a phrase from an old film, Clear and Present Danger. Do you remember that movie?

I’m not talking about the movie. I’m talking about this phrase: clear and present danger.

It’s exactly right.

This was not a subtle warning buried somewhere in my future. It was clear. It was present.

My body knew. My intuition knew. My conscious mind was the only part of me still negotiating with the evidence.

Intuition almost always—I’m going to say always—arrives before the proof.

It is information, not a courtroom verdict.

You don’t need a diagnosis to respond to behavior that’s harming you. You don’t need to establish what someone is before you decide that what they’re doing doesn’t work for you.

Not everyone is for you.

And here’s what I want to say about this. This single sentence could save you years: you don’t need to establish what someone is before you decide that what they’re doing isn’t working for you.

Just because someone appears before you—someone is being presented to you, you could say by God or by the universe—you have the right to say, “No, thank you.”

This is the thing: being spiritual, so often we think, “Wow, he’s being presented to me. He must be the one.”

No.

God is asking you to choose. “Is this what you want?”

You can say, “No, thank you.”

Hearing those words may save you a lot.

I’m going to move on here.

Every single time my husband cheated, I knew it before I had proof. My body told me.

With Jackie, two months after we were married, he went away for a weekend, supposedly to see his daughter. I thought it was odd that he had to go away to see his daughter. His daughter came into town, and he met her at the airport.

So I was suspicious, but I kept explaining it away, and I let him go.

At exactly 12:30 in the morning, my alarm went off, and I had not set it.

12:30 in the morning.

I went to bed normally. I’m trusting him. He’s a new husband, two months in.

My alarm went off at 12:30 in the morning. I didn’t set it.

What does that mean? My guides, the angels, somebody up there was trying to get me to see: “Jennifer, pay attention here.”

So I called him.

It went straight to voicemail.

He never called to say he was safe the way he promised, and I knew right then he wasn’t where he said he was. I knew he wasn’t with who he said he was going to be with.

I’m not here to walk you through any more of that. Of course, the divorce isn’t the point. The details of it aren’t what matters.

What matters—what I want you to take from this story—is that every single sign was already there before I said, “I do.”

I saw them. I felt them. And I went forward anyway.

I take full responsibility for that one.

So that’s a story about me. It’s about me not trusting what I knew.

Have you ever done that? Have you ever seen the red flags, thought they were parading, and explained them away?

Here’s another one: “Oh no, he’s not an alcoholic. He only drinks beer.”

Yeah, we have a tendency to explain things away.

You can be an alcoholic and drink anything if you’re drinking every day.

But that’s not the point.

Patterns are what we’re talking about. We’re talking about explaining things away.

I’ve got another one for you about me, and then one about a client.

Long before I met the gentleman I just talked about, I was in Georgia. My two boys were still young and living at home with me.

I met a very handsome Southern gentleman. I’ll call him Matt.

He was handsome, charming, and we spent three years together.

In those three years, he told me—not once, repeatedly—“I’ll never marry you. You have two sons. I don’t want a family from another man.”

And I kept thinking, “My love will change his mind. I love him enough for two.”

Every date I had with Matt revolved around alcohol. Having fun meant drinking.

I had two young boys at home. I didn’t live that way.

But that didn’t matter. I went along with it anyway.

He was tall. He was handsome. He was good to me—mostly in the beginning, anyway.

I stayed for three years, hoping he’d change his mind.

He never lied to me.

I lied to myself.

So how often do you lie to yourself about the things you’re hearing?

Here’s what I want you to remember, and I’m going to keep coming back to it tonight:

When someone tells you who they are, trust that.

When someone tells you who they are, believe them.

Not the fantasy version of them. Not the potential you wish to see. Not who you think they’ll become once they feel your love.

Who they are right now. Who they tell you they are right now, in front of you.

In the first conversation, in the first photo, on the first date—believe them.

Because I promise you, it rarely gets better than it is in the beginning.

In the beginning is a person’s best performance, not a preview of growth. Usually, it’s the ceiling, not the floor.

If someone tells you they’re not ready for a relationship, believe them.

If someone tells you they don’t want to get married, believe them.

If someone tells you they don’t want children, believe them.

And don’t go getting pregnant, hoping it will change his mind when the baby arrives.

I’ve watched women do this exact thing and then say, “I can’t believe he was angry when I told him I was pregnant, and he refused to bond with the child.”

He told you in advance what he wanted.

This isn’t a woman problem or a man problem. It’s a human problem.

We hear the sentence, and some part of us decides, “Oh, I’ll be the one who’s different. I’ll be the one who changes the ending.”

But when someone shows you who they are, we have to trust that. We need to believe them.

Who said that? Maya Angelou? Yeah, it’s a great phrase.

Now let me tell you about a client of mine.

I’m not going to use her name, but she has given me permission, and I’ll be using her story. I would not be talking about a client without permission. This is confidential, but I’m not sharing her name, and she felt it would be helpful for others to hear her story.

She was at a social mixer and started having a conversation with a woman she liked.

Another woman pulled a chair up between them, sat down, and took over the conversation entirely.

On the very first night, this woman said, “I want to get married.”

She said it outright.

So you already heard what she said.

My client didn’t want marriage. She said so clearly.

But instead of protecting the conversation she was already having with this other person, instead of saying, “Excuse me, I was talking to this person. I’d like to continue this conversation,” she didn’t.

She let this woman take over the conversation, and the person she was interested in understandably got up and walked away.

My client was hoping she and this new woman would be friends.

The other woman told her more than once, in plain language, “I don’t want friendship. I want marriage.”

My client kept not hearing it.

She asked me, “Maybe that’s not really what she means.”

I said, “She told you. How many times does someone have to say the same sentence before you believe they mean it?”

I’ve heard young women come to me in tears: “He told me he didn’t want a relationship, but I didn’t believe him. Yeah, he was dating five other women when he was dating me.”

Well, he told you up front.

We need to believe what we hear. It’s really important.

The dynamic did exactly what you would expect from there.

This person talked over my client and interrupted her. My client’s concerns weren’t heard. Anger and blame entered the picture.

At one point, my client apologized for something she didn’t even know she did. She didn’t even realize it needed an apology, but that’s what she did to keep the peace—to smooth things over, even when she didn’t cause the rupture.

Then her apology wasn’t accepted.

Imagine that.

Instead, she received a text message with a video about how to apologize, done by somebody else—a very long video instructing her in detail on exactly how she should apologize correctly.

She named the pattern herself, completely unprompted.

She said, “She’s just like my ex.”

Then further: “This is taking me back to my childhood, to my mother.”

So in the second session after this, when I was repeating these things back to my client, she was shaking her head.

“I didn’t hear her. I didn’t hear her. I didn’t hear her.”

She heard her. She thought she could move forward anyway and still get what she wanted.

Here’s the detail that told me everything.

On our call, I watched her on video—we were on Zoom—for almost 10 minutes, scratching her finger, scratching her finger, scratching her finger.

I didn’t say anything. I waited.

Then I asked, “How are you feeling? What is it you’re thinking? What are you feeling?”

There are a couple of things I want to talk to you about here.

The middle finger, in the framework I use, is about sexuality and anger.

Her body already knew.

Part of her wanted to tell this woman, “Go get lost,” or whatever, the very first night, and she didn’t have the words for it.

Her subconscious was doing the talking her mouth couldn’t do.

I want you to sit with this because we’ve talked about trauma before—how trauma sits in the body, how your body never lies.

My client’s body wasn’t lying. It was speaking volumes, shouting at her: “I’m angry. You should be angry. Why aren’t you angry?”

Her body was teaching her in miniature.

Her pattern-recognition system was working perfectly. She saw the resemblance to her old relationship. She traced it all the way back to the root.

She wasn’t confused about the pattern.

The problem was not that she couldn’t see it. The problem was hearing what the other person had told her plainly about what she wanted and accepting what her own body was telling her about the rest.

How often do we do exactly the opposite of what someone tells us and think, “Oh, we can make it work anyway”?

We can take a round peg and force it into a square hole. We’ll jam it in there.

Or a square peg and a round hole.

It doesn’t work.

How often do you try to have a relationship with somebody who’s abusing you, stealing from you, lying to you, or cheating on you?

Not because either shape is wrong. It doesn’t work because they were never going to fit.

That’s what happens when values aren’t aligned.

I’m not here to diagnose someone I’ve never evaluated, but I can name a simpler truth: when someone tells you clearly what they want and you believe you can change that, that belief in itself is its own red flag.

Not in them.

In the story we’re telling ourselves.

That belief is its own red flag—not in them, but in the story we’re telling ourselves.

What are we doing?

We’re gaslighting ourselves.

I want to stay with this because this is the heart of tonight’s show. Not my marriage. Not Jackie. Not Matt. Not my divorce.

Listening isn’t the same as hearing.

My client heard the words, “I don’t want to be friends,” with her ears every single time. She could have repeated the sentence back to me word for word. She did.

But she wasn’t listening.

She still wanted to be friends with this person who didn’t want to be friends with her.

Listening means letting what someone tells you land somewhere real enough that it moves your next decision.

Listening means letting what someone tells you land. Maybe breathe it in. Feel it in your body.

This is why I keep repeating this over and over tonight, on purpose:

When someone tells you who they are, or what they want, or what they don’t want, believe them.

Not acknowledge them. Not hear them out.

Believe them.

The way you’d believe a weather report when you hear a storm is coming.

You wouldn’t hear that there’s a tornado coming and then plan a picnic anyway, hoping, “Oh, the forecast is wrong,” because you wanted a nice day.

You would change your plans.

That’s what believing someone actually looks like. It changes what you do next, not just what you know.

But let’s go a little deeper, because I don’t want you leaving here just knowing that when someone tells you who they are, believe it.

I want you to understand why.

Because when you understand why, then you can make a change. If you don’t understand why you’re doing something, you’re not going to understand how to change the pattern.

Familiarity masquerades as chemistry.

Your nervous system interprets what is familiar as safe, even when what is familiar is dysfunction.

I want to slow this down again.

Basically, if you had trauma at home, if you were abused as a child, if it wasn’t safe at home, if your parents were narcissistic, abusive, or alcoholic, and you meet someone and they feel like home—run the other way.

That spark you feel isn’t always attraction. Sometimes it’s recognition.

If you grew up in a home where love came with conditions, with chaos, with silence and then rage, you learned early to read energies that were specific to home.

Like I just described.

Anxiety feels like excitement.

Distance feels like mystery.

Remember what I said? I was curious about Jackie. He was so far away. He was hiding something. I was curious. He was mysterious.

Control can feel like protection.

We don’t walk toward red flags because we’re stupid or broken.

We walk toward them because they feel like everything we’ve ever known.

We want to win the old battle.

Sometimes we choose the same pattern again because some part of us is hoping to finally, finally have a different ending—a happy ending.

And you deserve that. You do.

It’s as if getting it right this time could rewrite what happened the first time.

We confuse compassion with compatibility.

Understanding why someone behaves the way they do does not obligate you to remain available for that behavior.

You can fully understand someone’s wounds and still decide not to stand in the line of fire.

How many times have you explained somebody’s bad behavior away because of their wounds?

Having trauma in your past does not allow you to mistreat another.

We’re all works in progress. We’re all doing the best we can each day, each moment, getting better and better, right? That’s what we’re all here for—to get better and better.

So what else can we do?

Sometimes we fall in love with potential.

We relate to the person they could become instead of the person consistently in front of us today.

We believe we can help them, heal them, fix them, rescue them.

I want to say this plainly because your love cannot do someone else’s work for them.

Some people want what I call the IV drip of spirituality: “Let me lie back. Hook me up. Heal me. Fix me. Give me a sound bath, and I’ll be all well.”

It doesn’t work that way.

That approach avoids the uncomfortable work of actually changing—the shadow work, showing up for coaching, energy healing, weekly work, whatever the practice may be.

That’s not a judgment on any particular practice. It’s about what someone does with it.

The red flag isn’t a sound bath. The red flag is repeatedly refusing responsibility while expecting passive relief.

We override the body—the tightness, the dread, the confusion, the hypervigilance, even that gut feeling of, “This doesn’t feel right.”

When I was dating Matt in Georgia, every date was surrounded with “fun.”

“It’s fun. You have a drink. Let’s have fun. Let’s have a drink.”

I didn’t operate that way. I didn’t live that way.

But I kept feeling like, “Something’s not right. Something’s not right.”

Especially if you have addiction in your family, it can be harder to assess what’s really happening.

We tend to override that hum of always prepping for the next reaction.

The body whispers long before the evidence starts shouting.

Everything did.

When I woke up at 12:30 with no alarm set, certain something was wrong while my husband was away supposedly visiting his daughter, and he never called to say he’d arrived safely like he promised, I knew he wasn’t where he said he was.

We don’t want to look at that. I mean, it’s painful. I understand.

But we’ve got to be honest with ourselves instead of living in a fantasy.

We fear being unkind.

A boundary can disappoint someone without being cruel.

Those are not the same thing, even though it feels like they are in the moment.

Let’s slow down the last one because I think it’s the trap that stops so many of us from having healthy boundaries.

It stops us from saying no when we mean it. We say yes instead.

Good-hearted people don’t want to hurt somebody else, especially if you’re an empath.

Somewhere along the way, many of us learned that a good person doesn’t disappoint anyone.

Especially if you were taught to take care of a parent, you became the parent. You were constantly keeping the peace, smoothing things over, forgiving over and over and over again.

You learned that kindness means everyone stays comfortable all the time.

But it’s not kindness.

It’s self-abandonment wearing kindness as a costume.

A real boundary says, “This doesn’t work for me,” and it lets the other person have their honest reaction to that.

You are not responsible for somebody else’s reaction to your boundary.

It doesn’t require you to manage their feelings about your truth.

You’re allowed to disappoint someone and still be a good person.

Those two things live together all the time.

And here’s why the skill of explaining red flags away exists in the first place.

I want you to hear this with real compassion for yourself.

If you grew up around people who were inconsistent, unsafe, or hard to read, you learned to look for the good, minimize the bad, and stay hopeful because staying hopeful was often safer than confronting what was happening in a house you couldn’t leave.

That skill protected you as a child.

But it will sabotage you as an adult because, as an adult, you do have the ability to leave.

You can turn around.

You can say, “This doesn’t work for me.”

The old wiring just doesn’t know that yet.

Now here’s a little bit of fun. I know this has been tough, so we’re getting into the fun stuff.

This is where you get to know a little bit more about you.

This is where we turn everything I’ve just talked about into something you can do something about.

That’s where change happens.

You cannot know when something isn’t aligned until you know what alignment means to you.

And that means getting to know you.

This is my area of expertise. I help you learn to grow in love with yourself, getting to know who you are, because most women who grew up with trauma don’t know themselves.

I know because I was one of them.

So this is part of what I help you do: get to know who you are.

Most people can describe in vivid detail what they don’t want.

I bet you could right now.

“I don’t want a smoker. I don’t want somebody who snores. I don’t want somebody who’s a motorcyclist.”

There are a lot of things that you might not want.

But few people know what they really want.

That is where we are right now.

We’re looking at values.

A value isn’t a preference. It isn’t a mood.

A value is a non-negotiable.

I can tell you some of my values right off the top.

First things first: authenticity and integrity.

Those are my two top ones.

A value is non-negotiable, and when it’s violated, it tells you immediately something is wrong, no matter how much potential you see in the person or the moment.

Here are some others: honesty, respect, autonomy, growth, safety, reciprocity, loyalty that runs in both directions.

Yours may be different than mine.

And that’s exactly the point.

They’re yours to name, not mine to hand you.

So here’s your exercise.

Right now, name your top three values.

Just to yourself. Write them down.

Do you have a piece of paper?

If you’re driving, don’t write them down. Don’t text yourself.

Then ask:

“In a relationship or situation I’m currently explaining away, which of these values is actually being violated?”

I’m going to repeat it.

“In a relationship or situation I’m currently explaining away, which of these values is actually being violated?”

Not, “Is this person good or bad?”

That’s not the question.

Which specific value of yours is not being honored right now?

You don’t need them to change.

You just need to know your own values well enough to recognize immediately when something doesn’t fit, the same way you’d recognize a peg not fitting into a hole without needing to force it 20 different ways first.

There’s someone who has a tremendous list of values: Brené Brown.

You can Google “Brené Brown values,” and you’ll come up with this huge list, probably 50 or 100 different values. There are many.

But before I move further into values, I want to actually name the sentences we use.

Red flags rarely get explained away with one big lie.

They get explained away with small, reasonable-sounding sentences said quietly to ourselves in the space of about half a second.

I’m going to see if any of these sound like you.

“Oh, he’s just private.”

“He’s just passionate.”

“She didn’t mean it like that.”

“That’s just how her family communicates.”

“Oh, he’s under a lot of stress right now.”

“Oh, once things settle down, this won’t happen anymore.”

“Nobody’s perfect.”

“I’m probably overreacting.”

“It’s not a big deal.”

“I don’t want to make this into something.”

I want you to notice something about every one of those sentences.

They all do the same job.

They move the responsibility off the behavior and onto your perception of the behavior.

Instead of, “That behavior was the problem,” it becomes, “My reaction to the behavior might be the problem.”

That’s the whole mechanism right there.

You start doubting yourself instead of naming what happened.

We did a show a couple of weeks ago about self-trust and how you lose yourself in an abusive relationship. You may want to go back and listen to those. They will be very helpful.

So here’s your homework.

Every time you catch yourself using one of those sentences, stop and ask:

“Would I accept this explanation if a friend told it to me about her relationship?”

You already know the answer.

We’re always clearer about other people’s red flags than our own because we’re not the one invested in the outcome.

So borrow that clarity and turn it toward yourself.

I like to be fair here because not every uncomfortable moment is a red flag.

People are imperfect. That’s a fact.

Relationships have friction, and that’s not what we’re talking about.

What we’re talking about is repetition, escalation, concealment, and a refusal to repair.

I’m going to tell you that those issues I had with Jackie weren’t all of them. I didn’t tell you all of it.

He refused to talk about issues.

It was never a good time.

“I just got home from work.”

“I’m too tired.”

“I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

He never wanted to talk about issues.

And if somebody doesn’t want to talk about issues, you cannot—cannot—have a healthy relationship.

You’re always going to be at odds. That means you’ll never work through anything with them.

You won’t even be able to choose the paint for your bathroom, a door color, anything.

A healthy person can make a mistake, hear its impact, take responsibility, and change their behavior.

A dangerous pattern asks you to absorb the damage while the other person avoids accountability entirely.

Maybe you know someone who’s doing this currently.

All you can do for them is pray for them.

All you can do for them is pray for them.

You cannot fix another person.

If you’ve done the forgiveness, if you’ve let it go, you cannot make somebody change.

So here’s what I actually want you to do differently starting tonight.

Most of you wouldn’t hire an employee without an interview.

You wouldn’t rent an apartment without asking questions.

But you’ll build a life with someone you haven’t known six weeks and never ask them what they actually believe.

Here’s your interview.

Ask these questions early.

Ask them on the first date, the second date, the third date.

When you’re getting to know friends, you want to ask these questions too.

And confirm the answers by the fourth.

On beliefs and values:

What are your core values?

What do you stand for?

Are we aligned politically? Because if we’re not, it could grind us down over time.

Are you grounded in reality or living somewhere else?

Do you believe in God?

Are you living in reality, or are you waiting for a fairy tale to rescue you?

On health and your body:

How much do you drink—daily, socially, or does every outing revolve around it?

Do you smoke, use pot, or use drugs?

Are there health conditions I need to know about?

What’s your diet like, and is it going to be a source of daily friction between us?

If you’re going to be in an intimate relationship with somebody—and I know lots of women who are considering getting married and thinking, “Oh, I don’t want to have sex”—you need to talk about it first, ladies.

Intimacy: how important is it to you?

What are your expectations?

Are they realistic?

Or have they been shaped by porn, fantasy, or an actual past partner? Often, a partner in the past shifts the way we think.

On history:

Have you cheated before—once or more than once?

Because a pattern is not a phase. It’s a personality trait.

I know of someone, a dear friend, who said, “Oh, he’s changed all that. He said he’s not doing that anymore.”

Then it surfaced again in their marriage, and again and again and again.

If change were automatic just because someone said it, no one would ever be cheated on twice.

Here are some questions to ask out loud, early.

And then this is the part almost everybody skips:

Listen to the answers and believe what you hear.

I want to say a word about why most of us skip this.

Interviewing someone we’re falling for feels unromantic. It feels clinical, like we’re auditing them instead of loving them.

But think about what you already do without hesitation in every other important area of your life.

You research a car before you buy it.

You read reviews before you rent a hotel room.

You ask a contractor for references before he touches your roof.

And then you’ll hand someone your entire future—your children, your finances, your body, your name—after six weeks of good chemistry and never once ask the questions that would tell you whether this is actually safe ground to build on.

This is not about being suspicious of people.

It’s about respecting yourself enough to gather real information before you commit real years.

The right person will never be offended by these questions.

If someone gets defensive, evasive, or annoyed by your asking, that reaction itself is information.

Write it down.

So I’m going to bring you all the way back around.

Here’s what I told you at the start that I’d give you tonight.

I told you I’d show you my own trifecta.

I did.

Alcoholism, concealed identity, narcissistic and controlling behavior—all hiding behind a photograph where I already knew he was hiding something the moment I saw it.

I told you about a woman who saw her own patterns so clearly. She traced it back to her mother and still needed her body to scratch out the truth her mouth wouldn’t say.

I told you it isn’t about learning to spot red flags.

You already see them.

It’s about trusting yourself enough to turn around when you do.

And the sentence I want to leave you with tonight is this.

I know you could say it.

Say it with me:

When someone tells you who they are, believe them.

The first time.

Not the tenth time after the damage.

The first time.

If someone tells you who they are, if they tell you they’re not ready, believe them.

If they tell you they don’t want marriage, believe them.

If they tell you plainly that they don’t want something, it’s not opening a negotiation.

That is information.

Believe it, and let it change what you do next.

And ask yourself:

What did I know before I had proof?

What am I explaining away right now?

And if nothing changed—if this person remained exactly as they are today for the next year—would I willingly choose this one year from now?

Sit with that.

Let the silence answer it if the words won’t.

You don’t have to prove that someone is a narcissist.

You don’t have to persuade your friends.

You don’t have to build a courtroom case to justify what you already know.

You are allowed to notice that a relationship requires you to abandon yourself.

You’re allowed to notice that.

That’s a red flag.

The red flags are not a parade.

They are information.

Your work was never simply to see them.

Your work is to believe yourself when you do.

And if something you heard tonight resonated, that’s your nervous system recognizing truth.

Here’s what I want you to do with what you heard tonight.

Pull out your phone right now. Go to your browser and type in unbecoming.jenniferelizabethmasters.com.

Tap the share icon and choose “Add to Home Screen.”

Now it’s right up there on your phone, ready whenever you need it.

Start your seven-day trial free.

As part of that, you’ll get my full 51 Red Flags Guide along with your North Star Compass to help you clarify your path and recognize what’s taking you away from it.

One place, one step: Unbecoming.

JenniferElizabethMasters.com.

I love you.

Thank you for being here.

Make sure you listen to the replay. Listen to this two or three times. This is such valuable information. I’m going to listen to it again.

Have a wonderful night.

I’m so glad you were here.

Come home to you.