Relationship glossary
Plain-language definitions for the terms used across this site. Nothing here is a diagnosis — these describe observable behaviour patterns so you can name what you're seeing and read the guides without decoding jargon.
Flags and patterns
- Green flag
- A behaviour that repeats over time and makes a relationship safer, calmer and more predictable. A green flag is not a nice moment — it is a behaviour that holds up across weeks and across at least one disagreement. Consistency, repair after conflict, and a 'no' that lands without punishment carry far more weight than charm, generosity, or intensity.
- Red flag
- A recurring behaviour that predicts harm, confusion, or a loss of independence if the relationship continues. Red flags are patterns, not single bad days. The useful test is whether you can name a specific recent instance, and whether it repeats after being raised. Threats, intimidation, or physical harm are not flags to weigh — they are a safety issue.
- Counterfeit green flag
- A behaviour that imitates a healthy sign but serves control, image, or reassurance instead. Every green flag has a lookalike: confession as performance instead of honesty, instant over-apology instead of repair, generosity that creates obligation instead of care. Counterfeits usually feel intense early and thin out under a small, specific request.
- Love bombing
- An early flood of attention, future talk, and gifts that arrives before the person actually knows you. Love bombing is intensity used as a shortcut past the slow part of getting to know someone. The tell is what happens when you don't match the volume: withdrawal, sulking, or a sudden cooling.
- Gaslighting
- Repeatedly denying or rewriting events so the other person stops trusting their own memory. Phrases like 'I never said that' and 'you're too sensitive' do the work over time rather than in one conversation. The signature symptom is keeping mental or written receipts to defend basic facts.
- Trauma bonding
- An attachment strengthened by cycles of harm followed by relief, rather than by steady safety. Unpredictable warmth after tension is more binding than consistent warmth. That is why leaving can feel harder the worse things get — the relief is doing the bonding.
- Hoovering
- Contact after a breakup or discard designed to pull you back into the relationship. Hoovering can look like an apology, an emergency, nostalgia, a practical excuse, or a promise of change. Evidence of change is behaviour sustained without an audience, not a well-timed message.
Attachment styles
- Attachment style
- A person's habitual pattern for seeking closeness and handling distance under stress. Attachment styles describe tendencies, not diagnoses, and they shift with context and with a safer partner. They are most useful for separating a pattern in them from a pattern in how you respond to it.
- Secure attachment
- Comfort with both closeness and independence, and the ability to repair after conflict. Secure patterns look unremarkable from the outside: needs get named directly, distance isn't read as abandonment, and disagreements end with the relationship intact.
- Anxious attachment
- A pattern of heightened alarm about distance, often with protest behaviour when reassurance is missing. Anxious patterns tend to over-read small changes in tone or timing. Under stress the impulse is to close the gap immediately, which can make a slow, steady partner feel unsatisfying at first.
- Avoidant attachment
- A pattern of managing distress by increasing distance and minimising the need for closeness. Avoidant patterns often show up as needing space right when a conversation gets emotional. The intent is self-regulation rather than punishment, which is what separates it from stonewalling used as leverage.
- Disorganised (fearful-avoidant) attachment
- Wanting closeness and fearing it at the same time, producing push-pull cycles. Approach and withdrawal alternate, often quickly. It typically responds best to predictability — the same response to the same bid, repeated — rather than to intensity.
Avoidant and narcissistic patterns
- Avoidant pattern
- Withdrawal used to manage the withdrawing person's own discomfort, without an aim of control. Avoidant withdrawal is usually followed by a return and some willingness to talk once the intensity drops. Over time it can still cause real harm through unavailability, even when nothing punitive is intended.
- Stonewalling
- Refusing engagement as a way to end a conversation on one person's terms. Stonewalling differs from an avoidant time-out by what follows it: no return, no repair, and a cost attached to raising the subject again.
- Narcissistic pattern
- A behaviour pattern organised around image, control, and managing how others see the person. Used here to describe observable behaviour, not a clinical diagnosis. The distinguishing feature from an avoidant pattern is direction: harm serves an audience or an advantage rather than the person's own discomfort.
- Gray rock method
- Deliberately becoming uninteresting in contact you can't yet avoid, to reduce reaction and supply. Short, flat, factual replies with no emotion and no new information. It is a containment tactic for unavoidable contact, not a strategy for repairing a relationship.
- Smear campaign
- Reputation damage spread through mutual contacts, often ahead of or after a breakup. The aim is to control the story before you can tell it. Responses that work are usually short, factual, and repeated consistently rather than argued at length.