The Red Flags We Romanticised: How Emotional Illiteracy Taught Us to Call Pain Love

There is a particular kind of heartbreak that does not arrive through betrayal or abandonment. It arrives quietly, through awareness.

It is the moment you realise that what you defended, excused, prayed through, and labelled love was in fact a series of emotional compromises: sanctioned by culture, reinforced by faith, and normalised by generations who were never taught emotional literacy.

Many of us did not overlook red flags.
We romanticised them.

Not because we lacked intelligence or discernment, but because we were never given the language to name emotional harm. Especially when it appeared respectable, spiritual, or culturally endorsed.

What Red Flags, Actually Are?

The phrase red flag originates from warning systems. Simply said: signals meant to prompt pause, caution, and deploy reassessment. In relational contexts, red flags are not isolated mistakes or moments of conflict. They are repeated behavioural patterns that erode emotional safety, agency, dignity, and mutual respect.

Yet red flags are often misunderstood because they rarely announce themselves as danger. In emotionally underdeveloped societies, they frequently masquerade as virtues.

Control becomes protection.
Silence becomes peace.
Self-erasure becomes sacrifice.
Endurance becomes loyalty.

Decades of emotional intelligence research (popularised by scholars such as Daniel Goleman), consistently shows that healthy relationships depend on self-awareness, emotional regulation, empathy, and accountability. However, many societies across Africa, the diaspora, and beyond prioritised obedience/ conformity, resilience, and reputation over emotional fluency.

We learned how to stay in relationships, not how to assess them.

How We Were Conditioned to Romanticise Harm

Our romantic templates were inherited. Bear with me and hold on to this idea.

Culture taught us that “marriage is hard,” often without distinguishing between healthy effort and sustained emotional injury. Religion, in many contexts, elevated submission, forgiveness, and endurance while offering limited guidance on boundaries or accountability. Elders and thought leaders; often carrying their own unprocessed traumas, tend to model emotional suppression as maturity and hierarchy as order.

As a result, when warning signs appeared, we did not interpret them as signals to pause. We reframed them as spiritual tests, character-building seasons, or necessary sacrifices.

What we lacked was not love.
It was emotional literacy.

The Red Flags We Were Taught to Applaud

1.The Erasure of Personal Dreams in the Name of a “Joint Vision”

This red flag is often framed as partnership.

“Let us focus on us first.”
“Your time will come.”
“Someone has to make sacrifices.”

Over time, however, it becomes clear that the joint vision consistently requires one person’s ambitions to be postponed, downsized, or abandoned (while the other’s continue uninterrupted).

Healthy relationships integrate individual purpose into shared goals. They do not demand self-erasure as proof of commitment.

2.Prioritising Family Egos Over Personal Boundaries

In many African and diasporic contexts, respect for elders and extended family is deeply valued. Yet this reverence often comes at a cost: particularly when individuals are expected to tolerate emotional harm to preserve harmony. Think the traditional feuds involving in laws that would promote taking a side. The son having to choose between Mama vs partner and so on and so forth.

Disrespect is reframed as tradition.
Boundary-setting is labelled pride or rebellion.
Emotional labour is demanded but rarely reciprocated.

Emotional intelligence teaches that boundaries are not acts of defiance. They are instruments of clarity and sustainability.

3.Using Religion, Tradition, or Morality to Dismiss Emotional Reality

One of the most damaging red flags is selective spirituality.

Scripture is invoked when one partner is uncomfortable, but conveniently absent when accountability is required. Emotional pain is reframed as a lack of faith. Intuition is dismissed as disobedience. Exhaustion becomes a spiritual failure.

This is not faith. It is emotional avoidance cloaked in moral authority.

4.Financial Competition Disguised as Leadership

In some relationships, financial dynamics become arenas of power rather than collaboration. This may present as constant comparison of earnings, control over acceptable career paths, or unilateral financial decision-making justified as responsibility.

Research on relational security consistently shows that partners who are emotionally secure celebrate each other’s growth. Those who are not often experience another’s success as a threat.

5. Parental Authority Used to Diminish a Partner

In relationships involving children; particularly blended families (a family consisting of a couple, the children they have had together, and their children from previous relationships): one partner may unconsciously assert dominance by overriding decisions, setting unilateral rules, or using generosity to establish control.

The result is subtle but corrosive: diminished confidence, constant self-doubt, and an unspoken hierarchy that destabilises both the partnership and the children involved.

Emerging Red Flags in Modern Relationships (2026 and Beyond)

As relational awareness grows, red flags are becoming more sophisticated:

1. Emotional Minimalism

“I am just not expressive.”
It sounds self-aware. Mature, even. But sometimes it is said to be emotional avoidance dressed up as personality. Intimacy requires participation. Period!

2. Therapeutic Language as a Weapon

“I am protecting my peace.”
“That is a boundary.”

YES, both can be true. Both can also be shields.

Growth language without growth behaviour becomes a hiding place. Look around, healing does not eliminate accountability. In most cases it actually increases it.

3. Performative Progressiveness

For example, You can be loud about justice in public. Careless in private.

It is easy to advocate for humanity in theory. The real work shows up in how we treat the people closest to us.

Values are not what we post. They are what we practice when no one is watching. (Guilty? Seriously, no one told me about you.)

4. Digital Surveillance Framed as Care

“Send your location so I know you are safe.”

Concern is beautiful. We all at some point, may want to experience this. Beware of the thin line; when love starts to feel like constant reporting, something is misaligned.

5. Hyper-Independence as Emotional Avoidance

“I do not need anyone.”

Strength is powerful. But so is softness. Sometimes hyper-independence is just unprocessed hurt and trauma wearing a power suit.
We shut the door, but still want someone waiting outside it.

Why Many of Us Stayed

People often remain in unhealthy dynamics not because they are weak, but because familiarity is mistaken for safety. Attachment theory explains that unresolved emotional patterns can make chaos feel recognisable and are therefore compelling.

Dear reader, chemistry is not always compatibility and intensity is not intimacy.

The Ongoing Work of Unlearning

This reflection is not written from a place of completion, but commitment. I am also unlearning the beliefs that once felt normal:

• That silence equals strength

• That suffering equals virtue

• That love must be proven through endurance

I am learning instead about emotional regulation, secure attachment, mutuality, and repair as a certified emotional intelligence coach and a holistic educator.

This is personal work, but it is also generational.

An Invitation to Dialogue

This piece is not definitive. It is exploratory.

I welcome critique, disagreement, and additions.

1. Which red flags were you taught to call love?

2. What patterns deserve deeper examination?

3. Where do you see cultural nuance missing?

Emotional literacy is not merely personal healing but you may agree that it is collective repair. And the work has only just begun.

Next week, I will explore the counterpoint to this conversation: the green flags we were never taught to look for . Together we will unveil the quiet markers of emotional safety, mutual growth, and secure love that often feel unfamiliar before they feel right.

Further Reading and Resources

• Emotional Intelligence – Daniel Goleman

• Attached – Amir Levine & Rachel Heller

• Set Boundaries, Find Peace – Nedra Glover Tawwab

• Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents – Lindsay C. Gibson

• Esther Perel’s work on relational intelligence

• African-centred therapy and EQ coaching communities