Making new friends or choosing someone to date is hard sometimes. You can't know immediately what type of person you're hanging out with. Luckily, there are some signs that might indicate whether you'll even want to spend time with someone or not. Recently, over on the Ask Reddit subreddit, u/yuko-mo-me posed the question, "What's something subtle that instantly gives you bad vibes about someone?" And the responses were pretty eye-opening. Here are some of the best ones:
1. “When someone says, 'You can trust me.' Nope. If you gotta TELL me that with words, nope."
2. "Being comfortable enough shit-talking one of their 'close/mutual' friends to me the first time I meet them."
"I just cut ties with someone like this. At first, I was flattered, and I thought, 'Awww, she really trusts me. She knows I’ll keep things in confidence and that I don’t run around running my mouth.' But eventually, my common sense kicked in, and I realized she was just a manipulative, toxic person and was probably talking about me to others in the same fashion."
3. "When they start 'playfully' roasting you too early on in a connection. That’s for people who are close, and we aren’t anywhere near that."
4. "When they try to push god on me, say that things happen because it's 'god's plan,' or that they'll pray for me. Just...no. Don't do that shit to me. Keep your religion to yourself."
5. "When someone asks you something and starts talking over you before you're done or before you even have a chance to start. I know this can happen with someone who has ADHD, but in those cases, it's usually pretty easy to tell that they are just distracted or overexcited and not intentionally dismissive of you. The red flag is for someone who just genuinely does not give a shit what your answer was going to be in the first place."
"I'm getting old. I've had enough of that behavior. When someone does that to me, I look at them directly and unblinkingly and ask, 'If you didn't want to hear the answer, why did you ask me the question?'"
6. "How they view animals."
"I had a date that I had to cancel due to my dog suddenly feeling ill. It was nothing serious; he just had the shits. But when I canceled and asked for a raincheck, she responded, 'Lame excuse. This time your dog is sick, next time, your cat?' I noped out real quick after that."
7. Or, more specifically, "I get bad vibes when people say they don't like cats. I get it when someone has an allergy or if they've had a bad experience with cats, but when people say they just don't like cats, it's almost always down to cats having more boundaries than dogs or cats taking longer to trust people than dogs. I've found that people who dislike cats because of that generally are disrespectful of other people's boundaries, too, and don't want to put the time or effort in to gain someone else's trust."
8. "Asking the race of the people in your story when you're talking about something that has absolutely nothing to do with race."
9. "If they're always the 'good guy' when they tell stories about bad situations. Like, you may tend to tell stories of being in the right, but if the story had you in the wrong and you can't see it, red flag. If you never tell self-deprecating stories about your own flubs and mistakes, yellow flag."
10. "How they treat someone in a service position, waitstaff, etc."
11. "When they park in the fire lane to run into the grocery store, dry cleaners, or whatever, especially if it's in a parking lot where only one car can get around them at a time."
12. "When they’re far too pushy with questions and don’t leave you alone despite you making it super obvious that you don’t want to answer their questions."
"One of the driving factors of this is that bizarre false intimacy thing a lot of narcissists do. They have, like, a standard set of really personal questions they ask so that they can formulate a responding personality. It's gross."
13. "Obsessing about how other people eat their food. Like, eat your own food and mind your own damn business. How someone else eats isn't going to affect your food. I've never met someone who does this that didn't turn out to be a dick."
14. "That whole backhanded compliment thing. And then, them laughing it off as a joke. Like, wtf is your problem?"
15. "People who incessantly refer to you by name in a conversation. It comes across like some weird sales/cult strategy to engineer fake rapport."
16. "Guilt-tripping."
17. "Small lies. It can be anything: what they ate the night before, when they came home, their favorite color, etc. The smaller the lie is, the more suspicious the person becomes to me."
18. "Not being a reliable narrator and believing your assumptions are facts. My sister will often state what she believes are other people's thoughts or feelings as if they are 100% true. Needless to say, she can't be relied on for a trustworthy depiction of events, even in the most low-stake scenarios."
"I’ve noticed recently that people who call themselves empaths are the worst of this. It’s just assuming that you know the emotional states of others as if you’re a telepath."
19. And finally, "I've believed for a long time that observing someone drive in traffic can give you a good idea of who they are behind closed doors."
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.