Do You Listen to Your Woman’s Intuition?

How often do you really listen to your gut?

When you meet someone for the first time, you might feel it deep down—that little hint that something is off —but do you actually listen? Even if the person’s given you no reason not to trust him or her, do you feel like you have no right to “judge” them? That the little nagging feeling is not worthy of paying attention to?

We all have “radar” or intuition upon meeting someone for the first time; the Voice that speaks to us in the first few minutes, passing some gut judgment about what our inner Soul knows but our Ego plans to ignore.  We hear it like a voice in the wilderness;  like a voice coming over our left shoulder; like a good guy/bad guy routine—our intuition versus our ego.  The trouble starts when we ignore that voice if it is not saying something we (our Ego) wants to hear.

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From an online dating site, I met a man for the first time a couple of years ago. We had planned to meet in a restaurant. Actually, by mistake, we met in the parking lot early and laughingly agreed to make a quick detour into a grocery store before it closed, me for some crackers and him for some pomegranates. I had more groceries than he did and offered to pay for his (no biggie).  His radar went off right then and there that I was a “kind person who always considered others”—the opposite of the woman he had recently dated.  (I was just focused on getting the groceries paid for and into the car!). He kept his mouth shut, though, and off we went to dinner.

When I sat opposite him and finally showed up, mentally and physically, and turned all my attention to him, we started to chat easily and gracefully.  My Voice showed up probably within the first fifteen minutes. It was telling me. . . ”He’s the marrying type.”
It turned out he was older than I was by about eleven years (yes, he had fibbed on his online profile) and that he had been married before (he had grown children and even grandchildren), gotten divorced, and married another woman who had died in an accident two or three years earlier.

I didn’t know any of this when that Voice spoke to me. It was just intuition that said that we were looking for different things in the long term. But still, my demeanor changed once I heard that Voice. I even mentioned it to him teasingly but frankly during our dinner conversation.  I engaged him and entranced him, he said, because I was unlike any other woman he had met. He wanted to date me.  He knew by the end of that dinner date, though, that I probably  wouldn’t want to date him. He said that I was very gracious and kind but he sensed that might be the last he would see of me.

He was heading off to Europe for a three-week vacation the next day, and he kept emailing me throughout the trip. He knew what he wanted: a shot at me. Through his words and stories, he tickled my funny bone and engaged my mind.  He asked if I would meet him for a drink when he got back and I agreed to one drink…

Well, more than eighteen months later, I knew I had to break it off. Those were some fabulous months, by the way—he was generous and kind and the life of the party (and there were parties!), and he even made a couple of attempts to convince me to move in and marry him. He needed someone who would be ‘his girlfriend’ (we argued over that word) and whom he could, he hoped, make his fiancé and ultimately maybe even his wife.  My radar had been correct. Fifteen minutes into meeting him, my psyche told me my truth and it took me more than a year and a half for life to play it out and for me to really listen to it.

I have no regrets. We had some great times together—yet, still, my truth was right there in me all along.

Interestingly, before I made our breakup official, he started emailing another woman every day during a trip to New Zealand (which I had declined to join him on) and quickly he was once again “in love”.  She is probably more suited to his lifestyle, and I hope she’ll enjoy the moniker “girlfriend” and maybe even, someday, “wife.”

I wonder what her radar said to her when they met.  Whatever it was, I hope she’s listening.