This Dating Green Flag Is Easy to Fake. Here’s How to Tell If It’s Real.

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The term is “emotional vibe coding,” from Tinder’s Year in Swipe report on 2026 dating trends. In the survey, 56% of singles said honest conversations matter most, and 64% said dating needs more emotional honesty. People are tired of guessing games. They’ve also become extremely fluent in the language of emotional health.

Val Klimov, founder of the dating app Fledge, is skeptical of anyone who sounds a little too perfect in those first messages. “People have become very good at presenting the version of themselves they think a potential partner wants to see,” he told VICE. “Communication is important to me” looks lovely sitting in a text bubble, but Klimov calls statements like that “simply claims.” You only find out later whether someone actually means it.

Online dating has always involved some creative nonfiction. A Cornell study comparing people’s actual height, weight, and age with their profiles found that 81% fudged at least one. Communication researcher Catalina Toma and her colleagues later described dating profiles as a promise, showing as much who someone hopes to become as who they are right now. Saying you’re emotionally available isn’t much different. Anyone can say it before they’ve actually had to prove it.

Klimov pays more attention to what happens after someone says all the right things. A person can tell you they’re looking for something meaningful and then spend 40 minutes talking about themselves. Someone who keeps everything at “let’s see where it goes” might not be hiding beautiful openness to possibility; they might just not know what they want. Also pay close attention to how they talk about their ex. “If every previous partner was simply ‘crazy,’ that says more than any claim of being emotionally available,” he said.

Better clues usually appear when things aren’t going exactly their way. See how they behave when you disagree about something, or you take a few hours to answer because you have a job and a life. “They are ordinary moments that show how a person behaves when the conversation stops going exactly according to their expectations,” Klimov said. He isn’t suggesting anyone deliberately poke at a stranger to see if they snap. Just behave normally and watch what happens.

Five or ten messages still won’t tell you if somebody is emotionally available, and Klimov doesn’t pretend they will. “Emotional availability doesn’t need to be announced; it becomes visible through repeated behavior,” he said.

You can say all the right things and still be really bad at relationships. Unfortunately, dating is where you find that out.

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