You’ve probably seen the red flag filter going around social media—one that reveals the three “red flags” or warning signs its user displays in a relationship. To shout out the track called “Red Flag Collector” on her upcoming album Chemistry, Kelly Clarkson gave the game a go on TikTok, and instead, used it to share the three characteristics she steers clear of in a partner.
The three habits the filter gave her were “cancels plans,” “vegan,” and “mansplains.” The first two wouldn’t bother her, she said, and although the last one is “annoying,” she admitted, none of those falls in her top three. Her actual red flags are “a liar, somebody that projects their own issues on you, and someone that doesn’t have friends,” she said with a suspicious look. “No friends? Like, why do you not? That’s weird.”
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Jokes aside, there are relationship red flags everyone should look for, as SELF previously reported. Some of the biggies include “love bombing” (when a partner rushes a relationship forward), gaslighting, insults masked as “teasing,” codependency, extreme jealousy, and a lack of attentive listening, among others.
Ironically, Clarkson recently discussed relationship red flags with Priyanka Chopra-Jonas and Carey Hart on The Kelly Clarkson Show, noting that her ex-husband Brandon Blackstock didn’t get her a “push present” when she gave birth to their children River Rose, 8, and Remington Alexander, 7.
“I didn’t get a present,” she laughed in response to Hart, who gifted his wife, Pink, a motorcycle. “It should’ve been a red flag. I honestly don’t know that he knew.”
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After seven years of marriage, Clarkson filed for divorce from Blackstock in June 2020. And over the last three years, the singer has been honest about the difficulty in reconciling the loss. “I wanted to make it beautiful. I wanted to make it awesome. I wanted to make it everything it possibly could be, and sometimes that just doesn’t happen,” she said on the Angie Martinez IRL podcast in March, per Us Weekly.
Chemistry, out June 23, is a bonafide break-up album, but one that helped Clarkson process and grieve. Immediately after her split from Blackstock, she wrote 40 to 50 songs, she told Entertainment Weekly, many of which were too “truth-telling” to make the cut as one of the final 14 tracks.
In previewing the album at her April “Birthday at the Belasco” show in Las Vegas, she teared up on stage, she told EW—something she expects will happen for a good while. But she knows that, eventually, performing the songs will get easier.
“It just takes time to… not really separate, but to get to where you can remember it but you don’t drown in it,” she said. “You dive in, but you’re treading water.”
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