June 15, 2012 12:26 pm

Red Flag #67: She has more than one stuffed animal

Red Flag Stuffed AnimalsLet’s talk about what happened to damage you during your childhood.

That’s what we’ll be thinking when we notice your meticulously placed arrangement of stuffed animals staring back at us from your bed.

Before you start with the excuses, we’re not talking about Michael the Bear, who you named in your infancy, who’s been there through thick and thin, and who has lived through multiple moves, not to mention a plethora of ex-boyfriends. We get that you might have a sentimental teddy and while we’d rather it came from La Perla, we can deal with one fuzzy friend that happens to also be inanimate. Emphasis on one.

When your bedroom starts to resemble a furry zoo, we start to worry that you’re emotionally tied to your past in a way that’s preventing you from growing up. That’s a dangerous situation to get into if we ever consider this as something that’s long-term. If you can’t part with a few balls of stuffing in cute animal shapes, how can we expect you to be prepared for a relationship with, you know… a real person?

A woman with a cohort of stuffed animals also often doubles up on red flags as she’s probably the type of person that needs constant attention and coddling. If we don’t get you flowers for coming home late last Friday, don’t sign your anniversary card in the right handwriting, or don’t give you a standing ovation for brushing your teeth, you’ll get mad that we aren’t showering you with enough love and you’ll demand to know who we’ve been cheating on you with. Though now that you bring it up, you may not be entirely off base considering what a major mood killer it is to toss Molly the Monkey and Ellie the one-eared elephant to the floor every time we want to get laid.

You decide: how red is this flag?
360
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  • Dave

    Very true. I feel that this flag should be higher on the list. I dated a girl like this and boy did she have issues.

  • Meredith

    I have a bunch of stuffed animals, but there are only two that I am emotionally attached to. Will I ever sell/throw away any of them…not likely. Will I allow my children ( when I have them) to play with them…Yes, with the exception of two. I have them displayed around my room, some on the dresser, others on the tv stand, some more on the book shelf. But….there is never more than two on my bed. One is my most favorite stuffed puppy that my dad bought for me when I was very young and very sick. The other is a teddy bear dressed in Marine Corps dress blues that my brother bought for me when I went to his graduation from boot camp. I used to have a red bull dog (kinda went with the bear….USMC/Devil Dogs), but I did give that one away to a VERY good cause. But, I am nothing like the girl you are talking about. I am very independent, I don’t like to be smothered. I’d actually get suspicious if my boyfriend got me flowers. Since I really don’t like flowers, to me it says he fucked up, and he thinks I might already know, and he doesn’t want to get in trouble, so here is a gift to keep me happy.

    Now…IF I had named my stuffed animals (which I didn’t)….then yeah, I’d have to take that red flag.

  • heterofeminist

    this blog is full of sexist crap. my boyfriend actually likes stuffed animals and cute things more than i do. and he has issues, certainly, but not with his masculinity- he served in the marine corps for five years, and loves football, surfing, maps, and crossfit- all those other normatively “male” things too. this blog clearly writes from some sort of stereotyped heteronormative fantasy viewpoint, because real men and women just like this dont exist, or if they do, its only in the world of very shallow short-term dating which is filled with shallow media-fed judgments. when you’re with someone long-term a lot of this junk goes out the window, and you focus on helping each other work with your respective issues. you also stop seeing the other person as a representative of their gender, and appreciate them as an individual

    • Relax

      Translation: This one hit a little too close to home, so I’ll shame you with a bunch of predictably feminist pop-psych technical terms. We all dabbled in an anthropology course in college, that doesn’t mean that gender norms don’t exist. Lighten up you tight-wad.

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