Sometimes it feels like you need to trust your instincts in relationships but is it really intuition? Here’s my take on how to listen to your intuition in relationships and answer to: is your gut feeling always right?
Is your gut feeling always right in relationships?
Regarding that gut feeling you have in a relationship, it may not always be right. An emotional attachment can mean you are confusing intuition with insecurity or fear. Ask yourself this: is it about old wounds or are there real red flags? Let’s look at this insecurity or fear vs intuition.
Questions that arise around relationships and intuition…
Should you trust your gut feeling that someone likes you?
How can you tell if she or he isn’t the one? “Listen to your heart”… We’ve all heard that, haven’t we? Wasn’t there a song about it? Who was it that sang that?
Follow your gut feelings…another common response.
Trusting Your Gut Feeling About Someone You Like
The problem with trusting your gut feeling with someone you’re emotionally involved with is that emotional states can cloud out intuition and signal a problem-solving response instead – a ‘how to fix it analytically’ state!
Research indicates this, especially with negative emotional states. Bolte et al. 2003 found “a strong effect of mood on the ability to make intuitive coherence judgments”.
is your gut always right about cheating
Should you trust your gut feeling about cheating partners? Once again. Is it intuition? Or, is it fear of rejection or loss, paranoia causing that twang in your gut?
women’s intuition: cheating partners
Females have this women’s intuition in love – we have this gut feeling he’s cheating, no proof needed, right? I wrote about this idea that women’s intuition never fails – covers real-life stories.
Gut feeling or paranoia: cheating Partners
If you have a gut feeling he’s not being honest with you or a gut feeling she’s cheating and no proof exists, are you just being paranoid?
Consider this…Is your gut feeling about cheating by your partner purely due to insecurity and fear or some other negative mood? If it is, it could drive you to sabotage a potentially happy relationship.
Might you attract the very thing you wish to avoid…loss, betrayal, and rejection.
In hindsight, this may be clear, but in the relationship, it’s not.
Research indicates that emotional states will affect how we judge things and a negative mood will signal more analytic problem-solving rather than intuitive coherent judgment (Bolte et al. 2003).
Not good enough
Is it fear of loss because you covertly think you’re not good enough?
fear vs. intuition in a relationship
The dilemma of the ‘intuition vs paranoia cheating’ paradigm is basically about fear vs intuition in a relationship.
From a metaphysical perspective…the flip side of fear that leads you to fixate on what’s not real is the manifestation of the very thing you’re imagining…a betrayal.
In any case, fear drives away love, the emotion you so desire.
Don’t let fear control you or you’ll be living a state of anxiety, rather than living intuitively. If logic doesn’t tell you this. Songs. Movies will!
But…it’s difficult when strong emotional ties are invoked and probably much worse when a past significant relationship involved cheating, rejection, failure, or loss. For me, the loss of my mother in my teenage years affected lasting relationships until one day I realized my subconscious was creating this pattern of fear and insecurity in that department and I took steps to heal the past before moving on. It meant rewriting my subconscious belief about relationships and loss.
It can take years of soul-searching before you realize you are being driven by fear…fear of rejection, fear of loss.
Heart of Substance, Instinct vs Intuition
What to do…
- Check to see if fear is the likely driver
- Recognize the origin of the fear
- Is it a real threat or an old wound that needs healing
Intuition vs fear signs
The following chart that I compiled may help. It’s my best understanding.
But don’t underestimate intuition and instinctive fear working conjointly. This is where your intuition picks up deceitfulness or a real threat and triggers the emotions of fear and insecurity. There are ways to help decipher this as mentioned in the how-to listen to your intuition section below.
Genuine threats
Do not disregard your instincts if they are informing you of real danger. If your relationship or situation is an unhealthy one and the red flags are abuse – seek professional advice.
The red flags are telling you something is not right.
What are red flags in a relationship?
A ‘red flag’ in a relationship is a sign that the relationship you’re in is not what it seems.
I talk about ‘red alerts’ in my article on instinct vs intuition. Red alerts are a reaction. Red flags are different!
Red flags range from entirely benign things to blaring infidelities. They are subjective, however.
(Red flags could turn out to be either nothing or a genuine reason for change.)
Examples of red flags in a relationship could be seen as when your partner:
- unexpectedly comes home late from work a lot
- says another’s name during intimate times
- is secretive about things
- is abusive
- disappears without saying anything
- flirts with others
- gaslights you
- won’t say I love you
I could probably list a whole bunch of things and I know from comments that you could too. By the way, there may be no substance to these.
.. but how do you know?
…by listening to you intuition.
How to listen to your intuition in relationships
Listening to your intuition in relationships is tricky when it involves a strong emotional attachment. This is my own experience and I see it in other people. It is also widely written about.
How to listen to your intuition, in this case, is the same for any significant path in your life…reduce the ‘noise’, calm the emotions, and still the mind, but calming the negative emotions may be the hardest.
How Do I Follow My Intuition In Love Relationships?
To follow your intuition in love relationships, try looking at the relationship objectively like a third person (an outsider) or try deep calming activities, to allow your intuition room to guide you. This is about quietening the emotions so you can tune into your intuition that you can trust. Recall in Intuition vs Instinct, that intuition is like a soft whisper, rather than a pang in the gut or a feeling of urgency.
There are a few techniques you could try to allow your intuition to guide you, such as the following:
- Daily journaling. Write whatever comes to mind, but keep writing each day and then look back at your journal entries. Try looking at it as an outsider or third person.
- Hypnosis, meditation, or similar for deep relaxation so you can reach the alpha state of feeling calm and objective.
- Taking a trip away from the situation.
Intuition and relationships: you know when you know
The following is a guide to help you decipher what your gut feelings in a relationship are saying. Use it with the chart displayed above. The natural ways of reducing anxiety are mentioned in the previous section.
Some people look for answers externally, such as from psychics. Tarot is a medium for this. There are pros and cons to taking this approach. The positive is you’ll get an outside view, an objective look perhaps and this will switch off the anxiety for a while. The negative is that there’s no way to tell if the interpretation is true. Are you simply being told what you want to hear?
The answers are inside you. Trust your intuition. You know when you know.
By the way, it was Roxette who sang Listen to Your Heart.
Listen to your heart when he’s calling for you
Listen to your heart, there’s nothing else you can do
I don’t know where you’re going and I don’t know why
But listen to your heart before you tell him goodbye
Roxette, from Listen to Your Heart
Final thoughts
The ‘just knowing’ in romantic relationships is where even the most intuitive of us can get caught out. It takes a while to understand the effect of negative emotions. The above is my take from lived experience and from what I’ve seen with numerous others. Perhaps you have had similar or different experiences. Let me know in the comments.
References
Pubmed: Bolte A, Goschke T, Kuhl J. 2003. Emotion and intuition. Psychol Sci. 14(5):416-21. doi: 10.1111/1467-9280.01456. PMID: 12930470.
