Learning to trust your instincts?

[flowerlove]

Hey all,

 

I honestly wasn't sure about where to post this but, I figured I'd post it here since it kind of connects. You'll see why in a bit. See, I consider myself a pretty observant and intuitive person. I can usually sense when something really good or really bad is gonna happen in my life. In the past, whenever I've had my "suspicions" or "hunches" about certain things or people, I usually turned out to be right. The problem is, that when it comes to the opposite sex (guys), I usually doubt and second guess my intuition. I usually tell myself that I'm just imagining things or thinking what I want to think. I know I'm fairly young (only 20) so, my intuition can only improve with time but, how can I learn to trust it more (especially when it comes to guys) now?

 

For example, I was seeing this guy for the past seven months. Before he actually let me know that he had a crush on me, I always had a feeling that he was interested in me even though he never said anything & obviously, I turned out to be right. Anyway, I really liked him & he really liked me. Without making the story long, at one point things got so complicated that I ended things with him. The thing is I regret it and I realize that I made a mistake. We haven't talked or had any type of contact in over a month. A couple of weeks ago, I saw him in passing. We were walking past each other and we held prolonged eye contact with one another. Nothing else was said or done but, due to the fact that in the past, we were both pretty good at maintaining eye contact with one another and at "reading" each other, my first thought was "He still has feelings for me". I know it sounds like a pretty silly assumption to make off of something like eye contact. But as I mentioned before, eye contact was a pretty big thing between us in the past. I always felt as if we could read each other's emotions by simply looking into each other's eyes. The problem here was that while my first thought and feeling was that he still feels the same way about me as I do about him, the more I thought about it the more I started to doubt it. I kept telling myself that I was just seeing what I wanted to see. I also kept telling myself that I was also simply thinking what I wanted to think. All of this just confused me because for the first few hours, I was convinced that I was right, then I spoke to some friends about it and thought about it some more and I started to doubt it. Now, I'm just torn about whether these were my instincts speaking or if I was just thinking what I wanted.

 

The point of my post here is not to ask whether my initial feeling or thought was right but, rather to ask how (if there's any way to) can I learn to trust my instincts more? Also, how can one tell the difference between what your gut is actually telling you and what you have made yourself think? I know that this a tough topic to describe and discuss but any input is appreciated.

[Janesays]

I don't know. I'm a scientist at heart so the only instincts I have that I'm aware of is to eat, screw and not die.

[thatone]

think like a man.

 

it sounds silly/condescending but i know exactly one woman who can think like a man (and no, not possible, she's my attorney, about 20 years older than me, and happily married ). what do i mean think like a man?

 

firstly and most importantly, being able to negotiate from a position of rejection. i can tell my attorney "no, forget it" at the beginning of a conversation and she can still figure out a way to make whatever the situation is work. when she offers a compromise i can find a similar compromise and we figure it out. so many women are completely foreign to the idea of being told "no" that they can't handle it. those women therefore have little desire to consider the opinions, actions, and tendencies of anyone else including men, because they have a false sense of control. they completely miss signs and hints that they are being rejected by the men they're with because they so rarely hear the word "no" that they fail to see it coming.

 

so the first thing you get rid of is that female sense of control. you are not in control of anyone else. you can make the men go away, but you can't make them who you want them to be. so it's pointless to even consider such things. in the situation you described, you did not evaluate the man at all. when he didn't match your ideal image of a man you dreamed up a fantasy to justify getting rid of him, and acted on said fantasy, without even considering the facts. similarly, when many women decide to stay with someone they're dating they dream up a positive fantasy to convince themselves to do so, which is often equally inaccurate. they then wonder 6 months later how they wound up with such a man that they're no longer happy with.

 

a man does not do this, a man takes a statement or action and considers all possible explanations for it, then decides how he'll react to each possible outcome. if a woman says something that's a red flag, you think of all of the possible reasons why she did the thing she talked about, and you patiently wait for the truth to arise, you already know how you're going to react to whatever the truth is. if you're dating, you can take your collection of observations and determine the best candidate for further dating from all of your dates. you don't have to worry about any of the women disappearing generally if you have more than one interested, since as stated above women do not think about the person across the table from them nearly as much as they think about themselves, which is why you see these stories from women all the time about how they were blindsided by a sudden rejection from a man they went on 5 or 10 dates with, had sex with, etc. if they paid more attention they'd see it coming.

 

so that's it in a nutshell. once you have the image in your head of who you are and who you want to be, and have attained that image, you don't have much more reason to continue thinking about yourself, you can spend that extra time thinking about the other person. when you do so, objectively you will find that you discover all sorts of things, and when you find a good prospect you will be much more successful in keeping him, because with each passing date you will get a pretty good idea of who he is and why he is who he is. you can take that information and, as men do, be the person he wants to be with.

Edited June 20, 2011 by thatone