The Green Flags They Must Have

(and you need them, too.)

Hi there,

Before we get into today’s post, a quick note:

Next week, I’m doing something new - an exclusive audio session where I’ll be answering your questions. If you’re a paid subscriber, drop your question in the comments below. I’ll personally select a handful to respond to!

And if you’re not a paid subscriber yet, this is your invitation to join us for something a little more personal.

---

We have become extraordinarily fluent in the language of red flags.

We have made an art form of the early exit, the protective withdrawal, the preemptive strike against potential disappointment. And while that vigilance has its place, I think we’ve overcorrected.

We’ve forgotten how to recognize what is actually good.

I want to talk about green flags. And they boil down to two things: how you feel in your own skin when you’re with them - and their character.

Here’s a list of “green” flags that are non-negotiable.

You feel like yourself.

Fully, comfortably yourself. Your humor. Your contradictions. Your weirdness. Your opinions that not everyone will agree with. You enjoy time with them. You feel energized from spending time together instead of feeling drained. You feel like you aren’t fitting yourself into someone else’s projection of a partner. When you are with someone who is genuinely right for you, the energy you usually spend managing your presentation becomes available for something far more interesting. Actual connection.

You feel like you matter to them.

They want to know how your mind works. They’re curious about what shaped you, what you actually believe and why, and what you’re still trying to figure out. And here is why that matters more than almost anything else on this list. Being attractive to someone is not that hard. People will find you attractive. People will enjoy your company at dinner, text you enthusiastically for two weeks, and make you feel wanted.

Being truly curious about you is different. It requires attention. It requires the willingness to actually show up and pay attention to who a person is, rather than who you would like them to be. And that quality of attention, when you are on the receiving end of it, feels completely different from being desired. It feels like being valued.

You have ease together.

I am not talking about the absence of difficulty. Every relationship worth having will have its moments of friction, its necessary conversations, and its periods of discomfort. What I mean by ease is something more specific: Neither of you is forcing it. Neither of you is working to manufacture a connection that is not organically there. There is a natural reciprocity — they are as drawn to you as you are to them — and that reciprocity is very different from the anxious, effortful energy of a one-sided investment.

Photo by Alexander Mass on Unsplash

You can approach difficulty together.

This is perhaps the most underrated green flag of all. Do they shut down? Do you? Or can both of you stay present in a hard conversation, uncomfortable as it is, long enough to actually reach each other on the other side of it? The willingness to stay in difficulty together rather than flee from it is part of the foundation of what every long relationship requires.

You feel safe enough to be vulnerable (and you create that safety for them).

Safety in this context is not comfort. It is not the absence of challenge. It is the felt sense that you can say something true and uncertain and not be punished for it. That you can change your mind without losing their respect. That you can show the parts of yourself that are still unfinished and be met with curiosity rather than judgment. And equally, do you offer them that? Do you hold space for their vulnerability as carefully as you hope they will hold yours?

They have depth in their other relationships.

How someone loves people in their life is a preview of how they will love you. Not a perfect preview (family relationships are complicated and carry their own history), but a meaningful one, nonetheless. Do they show up consistently for the people they care about? Have they demonstrated the capacity to repair, to stay, to grow alongside someone over time? These are not incidental questions. They are the most revealing ones available to you in the early stages of knowing someone.

They know how to take care of themselves.

Emotionally. Financially. Physically. I am not talking about perfection or about having everything figured out. I am talking about a fundamental orientation toward self-responsibility. Can they sit with difficult feelings without requiring you to manage those feelings for them? Do they have some working relationship with their own inner life, through some form of personal development, through genuine self-reflection, through the willingness to be accountable for their own behavior? And practically, do they have a functional relationship with their financial reality, whatever stage of life they’re in? These capacities matter.

You share a vision for what a life well lived actually looks like.

This is the conversation most people avoid. What do you want? Children or not? How do you want to spend your time? What do you believe about money and about work and about what gives a life meaning? What is your relationship to faith, community, and family? These are not peripheral questions. They are the architecture of a shared life. And two people who love each other but want fundamentally different things from their lives are not poorly matched because they lack love. They are poorly matched because love, however real, cannot substitute for alignment.

They have integrity.

By which I mean something very specific. Their words and their actions correspond. They do what they say they will do. They take responsibility when they fall short rather than constructing elaborate explanations for why it was not their fault. They are committed not just to being good but to becoming better. This consistency between the private self and the public self, between the promise and the follow-through… is the engine of long-term trust. Without it, everything else doesn’t matter. This is about character.

There is genuine physical desire.

Attraction can develop. Chemistry deepens over time. I am not suggesting that the presence or absence of immediate physical electricity is determinative. But I am suggesting that desire matters and that pretending otherwise does a disservice to the full reality of what a romantic partnership is. The erotic dimension of a relationship is not separate from the emotional one. It is woven through it. And the willingness and ability to speak honestly about your physical needs, to bring that conversation into the relationship rather than hoping it works itself out, is itself a green flag worth noting.

I want to end with something that gets lost in the green flag conversation. These qualities are not a standard to hold your potential partner against while exempting yourself from the same scrutiny. They are a mirror. They ask you to look honestly at what you are bringing to the table, too.

What’s your most important green flag?

I want to hear from you.

Love,
Jillian