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Relationships
How Not to Marry Your Future Ex-Spouse
Love is blind but you needn't be.
Posted October 4, 2021 Reviewed by Jessica Schrader
Key points
- One way to know a potential mate is by gathering data through conversation and observation.
- It is also important to evaluate a person with your whole heart and your intuition.
- To read another person, we need to feel comfortable, safe, and relaxed in their presence—and to trust our gut when we don’t.
To check out a prospective mate, keep these three challenges in mind.
First, use your head. Steamy starts are lovely but it takes time to know a potential mate. One way we do this is through conversation and observation. It’s data if your boyfriend won’t visit your family or if he tells you that all his previous girlfriends and ex-wives were big losers. It’s data if you stop voicing your wants, expectations, and questions because you’re afraid to put her to the test.
Deepening the conversation is essential, along with observing whether the other person’s words are backed up by responsible action. It's also important to know the other person by seeing them with their friends and family, and also with yours. You can't really know someone by insulating the relationship.
Second, evaluate a potential mate with your whole heart. Do you love them? Do they love you? These are good questions, although an even better question is: "Is this relationship good for me?" To answer this question, you need to use your head, your heart, and one additional source of information that is often ignored or misunderstood. It's called intuition.
Use your intuition. Words and emotions aren’t the only ways we get information about each other. We also come to truly know the other through an intuitive understanding or “reading” that comes through the body. We know, through our bodies, whether a particular interaction leaves us feeling energized, uplifted, and inspired—or the opposite. We know, through our bodies, whom to trust, or believe, or avoid. What we call intuition and “gut reactions” is shorthand for the extraordinary human capacity to process information about another person that is beyond words.
Some time back, I sat for 20 minutes at a bus terminal in Providence, Rhode Island, and watched a small group of young men and women communicating in American Sign Language. I found one of these guys so appealing that I wanted to kidnap him and take him home to Kansas to be my friend. OK, maybe he was a bigot who was telling his friends how upset he was at the prospect of the government banning his assault rifles, but I doubt it. Nor was I responding to anything as obvious as body language, good looks, poise, or grace.
We are constantly taking in nonverbal information about people that we sense automatically and effortlessly. If a person’s words tell me one thing (“I’m feeling close to you”) but my automatic knowing intuits something different (I sense distance, disconnection, a “not-thereness”), I put more trust in what I feel than in the words I hear. I know when another person is distracted, even when that person claims to be paying attention. I make automatic judgments about who is kind, trustworthy, and forthcoming and who is not.
Of course, I modify these judgments as new information comes into the picture. We all make mistakes. We think the other person is snobby when actually they're shy or envious. We mistake our prejudices and paranoia with true knowing. Still, it’s interesting to think about how automatically we can get a sense of the other person that doesn’t rely on the content of what is said.
To read other people with some accurate intuition, we need to feel comfortable, safe, and relaxed in their presence—and to trust our gut when we don’t. Here's the hard part. Intense feelings that are part of the "Velcro Stage" of relationships block both clear thinking and intuition. Love can make you stupid. Emotional intensity (often confused with love) leads to clinging when we should be walking. Anxiety and fear will reduce both your thinking and intuition to the size of a pinto bean.
So slow things down and give yourself all the time you need to truly know this other person and consider all the information you can about a potential partner. Be open to information from your head, your heart, and your intuition. Don't leave one of these three sources of information out of the picture.
Love may be blind but you needn't be.
