Red flags worth acting on

This is a separate question from scams, which are about money and are covered elsewhere. This is about people who are real, but who will make your evening worse.

Online

• Only one partner ever communicates. Especially where the other is never on a call and never mentioned in the first person.
• Pressure to meet fast. Genuine people are content to talk for a while.
• Refusing a video call while pushing hard for a meeting.
• Answers that do not match the question. Consistently vague responses to direct questions are informative.
• Immediate escalation to explicit content after a neutral first message.
• Getting irritated when you ask reasonable questions. This is the most reliable early signal of all.

At a first meeting

The drink in public exists precisely so that you can observe this. Things worth noticing:

• One partner answering for the other, or correcting them.
• A partner who seems reluctant, distracted or is being watched.
• Contempt in how they talk about each other, even jokingly.
• Pushing past a stated limit “just to check” — the check is the problem.
• Trying to move the evening on faster than agreed.
• Ordering drinks for you, refilling without asking, or minimising how much you have had.
• Talking in detail about other people they have met, by name.

That last one is worth dwelling on. Someone who discusses previous partners' identities with you will discuss yours with the next person.

At an event

• Touching without asking, including in ways that are “friendly”.
• Following a couple around after a decline.
• Standing too close to activity they were not invited into.
• Photographing anything, at all, ever.
• Heavy drinking combined with persistence.
• Being asked to leave a space and arguing about it.

The subtle one: pressure that looks like enthusiasm

The hardest to name is the couple who are lovely, warm and relentlessly keen — who reframe every hesitation as shyness and treat every “maybe not” as an obstacle to be dissolved with charm.

This is pressure with better manners. The tell is that your no keeps needing to be repeated, in slightly different forms, to the same people.

What to do

Leave. That is genuinely the answer, and it costs you an evening.

You do not need certainty, a justification or a confrontation. “We're going to head off” is a complete sentence, and nobody in a healthy scene will think anything of it. At a venue, tell staff on your way out if something specific happened — that is how venues stay usable.