Men share the 10 biggest ‘green flags’ they have seen in women and it’s eye-opening

Many men cited empathy and kindness as strong factors, but other top answers like “creativity” are sparking conversation.

By

Adam Albright Hanna

By

GOOD Staff

Nov 7, 2025

By Adam Albright Hanna and GOOD Staff

November 7, 2025

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Photo credit: Canva – Happy woman giving the thumbs up

When we’re dating or thinking about starting a relationship, we often look out for subtle cues that speak volumes about a person’s character. From good communication skills and a positive outlook to healthy boundaries, some noteworthy traits make a person likable instantly.

These traits, also called “green flags,” top the list when one is looking for a suitable partner to live their life with. In a Reddit post, u/SealeDrop asked other men on the platform, “What are the biggest green flags in a girl?” Many flocked to the comments section to share what they find the most impressive in a girl that makes them feel she’s a keeper. Here are 10 of the best responses.

1. Showing kindness without expecting anything in return

green flags, dating, relationships, Reddit, men, women, what men want, communication, empathy, independence — A woman hands out food to a homeless person Canva

“Commenting as someone who recently found an amazing person after a long time of not being treated well. When they do nice things for you, it’s an investment in the shared happiness of the relationship and not self-serving and it isn’t with the intent of expecting something in return.” –u/JoeyMaddox “I’m trying to navigate healthy relationships after a lifetime of traumatic ones and this is ‘give and take’. Feeling safe and quelling the suspicions in the acceptance of someone else’s gestures.” –u/Jokers_friend

2. Creativity

“Creativity. The way she expresses and contributes to a conversation – smoothly shaking up the topic, creating things, describing concepts and feelings that most people have trouble expressing, etc. It is a form of intelligence I deeply appreciate.” –u/RedShadowF95 “What a great way to explain it. It’s crushing being that type of woman and meeting a potential partner who doesn’t enjoy it.” –u/Ok_Emergency455

3. Someone who listens with interest

“Asking a lot of questions about me, and listening to what I have to say. Going off of that, remembering said details in the future. One thing that shocked me about dating when I was younger was how infrequently women would ask me about myself, what I do, and what makes me happy. Some of them would ask but wouldn’t remember. And then the same people ask you ‘Why don’t you tell me anything or share with me.’ There is nothing to share when it’s not being received. It was like I was expected to just ‘be there’ along for the ride with her.” –u/jayhitter

4. Being independent

“Independence. She doesn’t require you to be around her to escort her to everything she does. She has her own hobbies and interests but is happy to share them but never pushes them onto you.” –u/The_Sum. “Sure, when you’re with someone the point is to enjoy doing things together and spending time together. But my ex literally wouldn’t hang with any of her friends, go shopping, or do anything without me right by her side. At first, it seemed cool and then it was just suffocating.” –u/Krajee1

5. Being strong and mature

“But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to appreciate strong women who are able to ultimately stand on their own first and foremost. At this age, we’ve all had our share of bad adult breakups, emotional pain, and traumas. It’s all about whether you’re able to still stand up and fight at the end of the day. Even if it’s little by little.” –u/scsnse “100% agree. If you want your marriage to be a partnership, it has to be with another adult.” –u/HarrysonTubman

6. Cooking

“It may sound sexist, but cooking. It means she has accepted responsibility for being an adult. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. Something as simple as chicken and vegetables. If a woman is living on their own and doesn’t have a job that requires crazy hours some basic cooking skills. Goes for men too. Pro tip. If you’re a guy who cooks something besides a hamburger on a grill it will definitely impress a lady.” –u/QuantityDelicious

7. Being an empath

“If you see her caring about how others are doing, worried about the well-being of animals and concerned someone is left out or feels down…you know she’s going to be a great partner.” –u/Fritzo2162 “I usually get won over by a big heart. So, if I hear she’s volunteering at an animal shelter or something, that’s when I know something’s right.” –u/magicmulder When they are concerned about your hunger, in a loving way. Always make sure that you eat.” –u/kind_user47

8. Good communication skills

“They are easily confused, but communicating is so much more than conversing. Anymore, half the time my husband and I are communicating very important things in public, we tend to use faces and gestures we’ve accidentally built into a language. But learning to communicate emotions and expectations can be incredibly difficult. If we hadn’t learned to have the hard convos openly, we wouldn’t have known how much space to give each other for processing big things, how each other likes to be supported even when we need those ‘quiet’ moments.” –u /ScarieltheMudmaid

9. Honesty is the best policy

“Open and honest communication. She doesn’t act huffy, play games, or do things like the silent treatment. If she has a problem, she brings it up and lays it out plain, and then is open to discussing it and getting the other person’s perspective. And part of this is being willing to change her mind when it’s discussed. Admittedly, this is more of a general struggle for people and not just with hypothetical girlfriends. But it’s something that I value more than a brick of solid gold.” –u/Jirekianu

10. Acceptance is key

“I think the biggest green flag is when you get to something you are self-conscious/embarrassed about and she says that she is OK with it. To me, a keeper is someone who will love and appreciate who you are, even if you have trouble accepting every part of who you are.” –u/theshizirl

These green flags reveal what many people quietly hope for in a partner: kindness, emotional maturity, good communication, and a strong sense of self. While everyone has different preferences, these shared values highlight the universal desire for genuine connection, respect, and mutual support. Spotting these signs early can make all the difference in building a relationship that’s not just exciting, but enduring.

This article originally appeared last year.

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Photo credit: Canva – A man with fast reflexes.

Culture, Internet

Italian man claims to be ‘human cheetah’ with lightning-fast reflexes

“I blinked and I missed it”

Mark Wales

4/29/2026

At first glance, this probably looks like a camera trick. Ken Lee, an Italian content creator, has built a massive online following by doing something that doesn’t quite feel real. Viewers refer to him as the “human cheetah” because it appears he has near-instant reflexes.

Grabbing objects out of the air with uncanny precision, flicking clothespins and lighters, and throwing a blur of punches and kicks at impossible speeds, it is easy to call him unbelievable. Half the audience thinks his viral speed videos are fake. The other half is just as convinced they are watching something incredibly rare.

@kenleefastestman
KAIOKEN DELL’UNIVERSO!🐉😱 PER VOI DIVENTO LUCE!!!💥(Super Saiyan 11° livello!💫) #kenlee🐉 #kenshirorealstar💥 #kaioken #universe #animeman #live #supersaiyan #ultrainstinct #maivisto #manga #dragonball #fastest #saitama #brucelee #goku #funny #divertente #comic
♬ suono originale – Ken Lee👽⚡

Hands so fast they blur time

In the video above, a timer runs to confirm its authenticity. In what looks like half a second, he reaches out and snags the lighter from the table. To prove it is real, he does it twice.

Having amassed millions of followers on his TikTok page, the identity behind the mysterious influencer remains largely unknown. Active since around 2022, with almost 100 million accumulated likes, Lee has cultivated a fandom around his self-proclaimed “Superhero per Hobby!”

Do you believe it is real? Is this person the fastest human alive? Many followers cannot wait for the next video to be posted. Plenty of his fervent fans are Italian, so sifting through the remarks takes a bit of hunting. Here are some comments that sum up how much people enjoy the fun and the spectacle:

“Ken lee the fastest and the best”

“Most dangerous human”

“Is this what the lighter sees before my homie steals it”

“It was sped up during he grabbed the lighter, if u count up with the timer u would be off by like 0,5 seconds whenever he grabs the lighter.”

“If the flash were human”

“How is it possible to get such powers ?”

“I blinked and I missed it”

@kenleefastestman
AIR OF THE DRAGON! 🐉😱 #kenlee🐉 #kenshirorealstar💥 #animeman #over100000 #ultrainstinct #over100000 #saitama #goku #brucelee #speedoflight⚡ #manga #cartoon #fastest #flash #velocita #sport #impossible #lighters #world #record #real #speed
♬ suono originale – Ken Lee👽⚡

People love good entertainment

The awe of peak performance attracts people to watch elite athletes, musicians, or even dancers. There is something that deeply satisfies all of us when a human appears to push a skill to its limit. Whether it is real or fake seems to matter less than the opportunity to chime in on some good entertainment.

How far could any of us go by practicing and repeating a particular motion over and over until it is mastered? Beneath the flashy nickname and his viral speed videos, Lee’s content has a way of drawing people in. This is not a superpower. Just repetition. Focus. Obsession. And maybe some digital wizardry.

@kenleefastestman
KEN LEE💫THE NEW SUPERHERO! 👽⚡️🌎🐉#kenleespeed👽⚡ #fastestmanalive⚡️ #speedoflight #worldspeed🌎 #superhero
♬ audio originale – Ken Lee👽⚡

Testing the science of speed

If you wish to question the validity of Lee’s performances, maybe some basic science can help. Human reaction time is not just a reflex. A 2024 study found that the nervous system can fine-tune responses in real time. Practice can make movements appear almost automatic.

It has been well established in research that the gap between seeing something and responding has a limit. A 2025 study concluded that the most elite extremes allow for reaction times of 100 milliseconds. At that speed, the human brain can barely process that something has happened.

Science explains Lee is not necessarily moving as fast as we might perceive him to be. And therein lies all the fun of it. We cannot prove it is real, nor can we actually prove that it is fake.

Maybe Lee is the “fastest man alive” or the so-called “human cheetah.” Or maybe he is just a remarkable entertainer. Either way, he has clearly tapped into something strange and fascinating: a blend of human ability and fantasy that people do not want to miss.

To give context to Lee’s videos, watch this performance on Tú Sí Que Vales:

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Photo credit: LisaStrachan/iStock via Getty Images – Fear not: There isn’t anything that needs saving.

Culture, Media

Despite all the likes, literallys and dropped g’s, English isn’t decaying before our eyes

Why “bad” English is nothing new.

Good Partner

4/22/2026

Valerie M. Fridland

As a linguistics professor, I’m often asked why English is decaying before our eyes, whether it’s “like” being used promiscuously, t’s being dropped deleteriously or “literally” being deployed nonliterally.

While these common gripes point to eccentric speech patterns, they don’t point to grammatical annihilation. English has weathered far worse.

Let’s start with something we can all agree on: Old English, spoken from approximately A.D. 450 to 1100, is pretty unintelligible to us today. Anyone who’s had the pleasure of reading “Beowulf” in high school knows how different English back then used to sound. Word endings did a lot more grammatical work, and verbs followed more complicated patterns. Remnants of those rules fuel lingering debates today, such as when to use “whom” over “who,” and whether the past tense of “sneak” is “snuck” or “sneaked.”

The language went on to experience centuries of tumult: Viking invasions, which introduced Old Norse influence; Anglo-Norman French rule, which shifted the language of the elite to French; and 18th-Century grammarians, who dictated norms with their elocution and grammar guides.

In that time, English has lost almost all of the more complex linguistic trappings it was born with to become the language we know and – at least, sometimes – love today. And as I explain in my new book, “Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents,” it was all thanks to the way that language naturally evolves to meet the social needs of its speakers.

From dropping the ‘l’ to dropping the ‘g’

The things we tend to label as “bad” or sloppy English – for instance, the “g” that gets lost from our -ing endings or the deletion of a “t” when we say a word like “innernet” – actually reflect speech habits that are centuries old.

Take, for example, “often.” Originally spoken with the “t,” that pronunciation gradually became less favored around the 15th century, alongside that “l” in “talk” and the “k” in know. Meanwhile, the “s” now stuck on the back of verbs like “does” and “makes” began as a dialectal variant that only became popular in 16th-century London. It gradually replaced “th” whenever third persons were involved, as in “The lady doth protest too much.”

While dropping the “l” in talk may have been initially frowned upon, today it would be strange if you pronounced the letter. And the shift makes sense: It smoothed out some linguistic awkwardness for the sake of efficiency.

If people learned to look at language more like linguists, they might come around to seeing that there is more than one perspective on what good speech consists of.

And yes, that absolutely is a sentence ending with a preposition – something many modern grammar guides discourage, even though the idea only took hold after 18th-century grammarian Robert Lowth intimated it was a less elegant choice based on the model of Latin.

Though Lowth voiced no hard and fast rule against it, many a grammar maven later misconstrued his advice as an admonition. Just like that, a mere suggestion became grammatical law.

The rise of the grammar sticklers

Many of today’s ideas about what constitutes correct English are based on a singular – often mistaken – 19th-century view of the forces that govern our language.

In the late 18th century, the English-speaking world began experiencing class restructuring and higher literacy rates. As greater class mobility became possible, accent differences became class markers that separated new money from old money.

Emulation of upper-crust speech norms became popular among the nouveau riche. With literacy also on the rise, grammarians and elocutionists raced to dictate the terms of “proper” English on and off the page, which led to the rise of usage guides and dictionaries that were eager to sell a certain brand of speech.

Another example of grammarian angst reconfiguring the view of an otherwise perfectly fine form is the droppin’ of the “g.” It became so tied to slovenly speech that it was branded with an apostrophe in the 19th century to make sure no one missed its lackadaisical and nonstandard nature.

Up until the 19th century, however, no one seemed to care whether one pronounced it as “-in” or “-ing.”

Evidence suggests that -ing wasn’t even heard as the correct form. Many elocution guides from the 18th century provide rhyming word pairs like “herring/heron,” “coughing/coffin” and “jerking/jerkin,” which suggest that “-in” may have been the preferred pronunciation of words ending with “-ing.” Even writer and satirist Jonathan Swift – a frequent lobbyist for “proper” English – rhymes “brewing” with “ruin” in his 1731 poem “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D..”

Embrace the change

Language has always shifted and evolved. People often bristle at changes from what they’ve known to what is new. And maybe that’s because this process often begins with speakers that society usually looks less favorably on: the young, the female, the poor, the nonwhite.

But it’s important to remember that being disliked and bad are not the same thing – that today’s speech pariahs are driven by the same linguistic and social needs as the Londoners who started going with “does” instead of “doth” or dropped the “t” in often.

So if you think the speech that comes from your lips is the “correct” version, think again. Thou, like every other English speaker, art literally the product of centuries of linguistic reinvention.

This article originally appeared on The Conversation. You can read it here.

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Photo credit: Ian Taylor Photographer – Two young children play in the grass.

Culture, Media

10 boys and 10 girls were left alone in separate houses and the different results are just wild

The premise was simple but high stakes.

Adam Albright Hanna

GOOD Staff

4/19/2026

It sounds like the plot of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. However, in the mid-2000s, it was a very real and very controversial reality television experiment.

Footage from the UK Channel 4 documentary Boys and Girls Alone is captivating audiences all over again. It offers a fascinating and chaotic look at what happens when you remove parents from the equation.

The premise was simple but high stakes. Twenty children, aged 11 and 12, were split into two groups by gender. Ten boys and ten girls were placed in separate houses and told to live without adult supervision for five days.

The Setup

While there were safety nets in place, the day-to-day living was entirely up to the kids. A camera crew was present but instructed not to intervene unless safety was at risk. The children could also ring a bell to speak to a nurse or psychiatrist.

The houses were fully stocked with food, cleaning supplies, toys, and paints. Everything they needed to survive was there. They just had to figure out how to use it.

The Boys: Instant Chaos

In the boys’ house, the unraveling was almost immediate. The newfound freedom triggered a rapid descent into high-energy anarchy.

They engaged in water pistol fights and threw cushions. In one memorable instance, a boy named Michael covered the carpet in sticky popcorn kernels just because he could.

The destruction eventually escalated to the walls. The boys covered the house in writing, drawing, and paint. But the euphoria of freedom eventually crashed into the reality of consequences.

“We never expected to be like this, but I’m really upset that we trashed it so badly,” one boy admitted in the footage. “We were trying to explore everything at once and got too carried away in ourselves.”

Their attempts to clean up were frantic and largely ineffective. Nutrition also took a hit. Despite having completed a cooking course, the boys survived mostly on cereal, sugar, and the occasional frozen pizza. By the end of the week, the house was trashed, and the group had fractured into opposing factions.

The Girls: Organized Society

The girls’ house looked like a different planet.

In stark contrast to the mayhem next door, the girls immediately established a functioning society. They organized a cooking roster, with a girl named Sherry preparing their first meal. They baked cakes. They put on a fashion show. They even drew up a scrupulous chores list to ensure the house stayed livable.

While their stay wasn’t devoid of interpersonal drama, the experiment highlighted a fascinating divergence in socialization. Left to their own devices, the girls prioritized community and maintenance. The boys tested the absolute limits of their environment until it broke.

The documentary was controversial when it aired, with critics questioning the ethics of placing children in unsupervised situations for entertainment. But what made it so enduring, and why footage keeps resurfacing years later, is what it reveals about how kids are socialized long before anyone puts them in a house together. The boys weren’t born anarchists and the girls weren’t born organizers. They arrived at those houses already shaped by years of being told, implicitly and explicitly, what boys do and what girls do. Whether that’s a nature story or a nurture story is the question the documentary keeps asking without quite answering, which is probably why people are still watching and arguing about it nearly two decades later.

This article originally appeared two years ago. It has been updated.

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Men share the 10 biggest ‘green flags’ they have seen in women and it’s eye-opening

1. Showing kindness without expecting anything in return

2. Creativity

3. Someone who listens with interest

4. Being independent

5. Being strong and mature

6. Cooking

7. Being an empath

8. Good communication skills

9. Honesty is the best policy

10. Acceptance is key

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More for You

Italian man claims to be ‘human cheetah’ with lightning-fast reflexes

Hands so fast they blur time

People love good entertainment

Testing the science of speed

Despite all the likes, literallys and dropped g’s, English isn’t decaying before our eyes

From dropping the ‘l’ to dropping the ‘g’

The rise of the grammar sticklers

Embrace the change

10 boys and 10 girls were left alone in separate houses and the different results are just wild

The Setup

The Boys: Instant Chaos

The Girls: Organized Society

How does your brain decide between the road not taken or the same old route? Resolving conflicting memories is key to navigation

Most people don’t know what they don’t know, but think they do – correcting your metaknowledge can make you a better teacher and learner

You can change your emotions – but it’s a 2‑step process that takes some effort

What makes a good teacher? Ask a Republican and a Democrat, and they are likely to agree

A new therapy is helping people find joy again, and it’s flipping how we treat depression

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9-year-old girl asks Steph Curry why his shoes aren’t in girls’ sizes. The response was perfect.

A BBC crew broke ‘cardinal rule’ of nature documentaries to save trapped penguins