Expert Advice: The Flag System

Hello My Friends! We have an exciting article today about what I call “The Flag System”.

To pique your interest, I’ll describe this as a 100% foolproof way to know when to end any relationship with ease. Interested? Great! Let’s go.

In our everyday life, we as humans are constantly re-evaluating people and wondering if we should continue to maintain the relationship. Hundreds of points and counter-points come into our mind. Sometimes we make the wrong decision after thinking about it for days, and sometimes we make the right decision on a whim. So how are we to know if the decision we made is the right one, long term?

I’m going to preface this by saying one thing that is very important to keep in mind: People hardly change their core principles. That is to say, the ideas that keep us moving on a day to day basis, that we base all of our decisions on, those don’t really change no matter how much time passes. Unless there’s a life changing event, people largely stay the same. So if you break up with someone, or call off a friendship, chances are in a couple of years even, you would face the same problems.

So what is the flag system? It’s a system used to rate an individuals actions in an unbiased way to establish whether a continued relationship is beneficial. As humans, we’ll always try to argue away why a specific action wasn’t that bad. This system takes away your ability to do that.

Based on an individual’s actions, you’ll rate that particular action as a Red, Orange or Yellow Flag. The color can have a corresponding size of “Baby, Medium or Large” if you prefer a more exact system. Now, to assign the color, you can only take a one sentence description of what the individual did, WITHOUT USING THE WORD “BUT”, and you would rate that as though your friend had told you someone did that to them. For example: “My boyfriend cheated on me, but we were in a gray area and he wasn’t sure if we were together and… blah blah blah”. Great story, very touching, but the phrase we’re looking at is “My boyfriend cheated on me”. If you’re trying to give me context on why the sentence isn’t as bad as it sounds, you’ve already answered the question. In this particular case, this is a red flag which means you IMMEDIATELY break up, no questions asked, no conversations to be had. I’ve listed the breakdown of the flag system below. Flag sizes are an optional implementation:

3 Yellow = Break up
3 baby yellows = 1 Big Yellow
2 medium yellows = 1 Big Yellow

2 Orange = Break up
3 baby oranges = 1 Big Orange
2 medium oranges = 1 Big Orange

1 Red = Break up
2 baby reds = 1 Big Red
1 medium red = 1 Big Red

So just to provide a few more examples, what’s a Yellow or Orange look like?

Orange: “My SO told me they had an STD test, but they hadn’t. They told me before we had sex that they hadn’t had the test done and they lied and they were going to go get one done immediately”. This is a clear lie and had the individual not told you the truth, it would have been a red flag. However, because they told you the truth and got the test before you had sex, it means their conscious kicked in. A bad trend that makes you doubt the person, but depending on what traits you place most value on, this may not be grounds for immediate termination. A “slippery slope scenario” lands this in the Orange category.

Yellow: “My friend and I keep making plans to hang out together, but they cancel last minute every time. Most recently, my friend bailed on coming to my wedding.” This is a great example for 2 reasons. One, it illustrates how a small problem can snowball out of control, but two, it shows where there is and isn’t room for leniency. Technically, your friend constantly bailing to hang out isn’t an indicator of a bad friendship or even of needing to cut things off. It’s maybe just very annoying. So you either give yourself some space from the person, or you have a chat. Maybe things don’t improve, that’s a series of small yellow flag, because again, you’re just aggressively annoyed at this point. Then some more important events come up like weddings or baby showers, and they do the same thing. This earns them a big Yellow flag, and now you stop inviting them to events. Now maybe they realize they’ve messed up, and offer to throw you a birthday party, which of course (because people really don’t change like that), they forget to do or its a complete disaster. Well, now they’ve ruined your birthday and that’s another big Yellow flag. You don’t have time to deal with this kind of irresponsibility all the time, so maybe it’s time to terminate the relationship because now you’ve got 3 big Yellow flags. So this shows that a series of seemingly small, insignificant items can snowball into something that exhibits a behavior you just need to get rid of in your life.

I hope this has been helpful! We’ve had a variety of questions come in that get answered using the Flag System, so hopefully, this answers the questions for a lot of our readers! If you still have questions, please don’t hesitate to email us at opinionsofanewagestudent@gmail.com or comment below!