Calling out ‘beige flags’ is TikTok’s latest dating trend

That beige flags are debatable may have helped the term take off on TikTok, a platform that prioritises engagement. Many of the videos are accompanied by heated comment sections, some of them tens of thousands of messages long, in which viewers weigh in on just how peeved they would be by the trait in question.

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Kallie Fockler, 19, a barista in eastern Ohio, watched one video in which a woman describes her boyfriend’s habit of eating live ants he finds crawling around his house as a beige flag. “To me? Total red flag,” Fockler says. (Many commenters agreed, although eating insects is common in many cultures.)

Fockler posted a similar video about her own boyfriend, who struggles to remember plans but can retain a seemingly unlimited number of facts about sharks. Fockler is charmed by his encyclopedic knowledge of fin shapes, but some commenters on her video were not.

“I’ll take the sharks,” she says, “as long as you’re not eating ants”.

The newest shade of flag has entered a sprawling lexicon of dating terms that is expanding as more people discuss their love lives online. Definitions are in flux: in a video posted on TikTok last year, Caitlin MacPhail described beige flags as things that come across as boring on a dating app profile — like alluding in any way to The Office. “If you’re looking for the Pam to your Jim, I’m just going to assume you have no deeper meaning,” she says.

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But the term has evolved into something weirder. “My husband’s beige flag is when he acts like he’s going to give me a kiss,” one user wrote in a video posted last month, “but he’s really hiding a whole strawberry in his mouth and then proceeds to push the strawberry into my mouth”.

Lamont White, a dating coach in Atlanta, says it was good for partners to discover each other’s beige flags. In the long term, we need to know if we can stomach a person’s oddities – and vice versa. “Guess what?” he says. “You have beige flags, too.”

Ebony Jasmine Harris, 26, a content creator in Sarasota, Florida, thinks that anyone who denies having a beige flag is lying. Hers is that she refuses to save the phone number of anyone she’s dating. “It is a little confusing,” she admits. “Sometimes I don’t know who is who until I text the conversation.”

When talk of red flags dominated TikTok, Harris says, she had started to feel discouraged about the dating scene. Beige flags have ever so slightly brightened her outlook.

“Maybe there’s a little hope,” she says, “that I’ll just end up with somebody weird”.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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