Is it anxiety or intuition, after the way my marriage ended?

If the feeling points at something specific this person did and stays steady when you’re calm, treat it as intuition and ask about it. If it’s a general alarm that says “don’t miss it this time,” it’s more likely the end of your marriage talking. Both deserve attention. Only one is information about the person in front of you.

Why is it so hard to trust my own read now?

Take Hassan, 52. After 18 years, his wife told him she’d been unhappy for a long time and had already spoken to a lawyer. He hadn’t seen it coming. Looking back, he can list a dozen signs: the separate hobbies, the shorter conversations, the trip she took alone. He replays them often, and each time he asks himself how he could have missed them.

Now he’s four months into dating Leila. This week she’s been less chatty, busy helping her mother move. And Hassan’s mind has gone straight to: here it is again, and this time you’d better not miss it.

The problem is that Hassan is reading the present with a rulebook written in hindsight. In a classic 1975 study, the psychologist Baruch Fischhoff found that once people knew how something turned out, they judged that outcome as having been more predictable than it was.1 They also changed which details they saw as important, and they didn’t realize they were doing it.1 People overestimated what they would have known without being told the ending.1

The signs Hassan lists were real. But at the time, they were mixed in with hundreds of ordinary days that looked exactly the same. Knowing the ending makes them glow.

Was I really that blind?

Probably not, and you’re far from alone. Many people on the receiving end of a divorce say they didn’t see it coming. In a Stanford survey that followed couples from 2009 to 2015, women initiated 69% of the 92 divorces, so a lot of men, and plenty of women, found themselves where Hassan is.2 Being caught off guard isn’t a character flaw. A marriage can change slowly, and one person can be deciding while the other is still living in it.

That matters, because the lesson many people take from a blindside is “trust nothing, watch everything.” It’s an understandable vow. It just doesn’t make you better at reading people.

What does anxiety do to what I notice?

It sharpens the search for danger. A large review of 172 studies found that anxious people reliably pay more attention to threatening information than calm people do, sometimes before they’re even aware of it.3 Non-anxious people didn’t show the same pull.3

So when you’re on high alert, you’ll spot every short reply, every change of plans, every distracted evening. You’ll also miss the ordinary, reassuring things sitting right beside them. That isn’t intuition getting sharper. It’s attention getting narrower.

Intuition is different. It usually comes from something specific, and it doesn’t need to shout.

So how do I tell them apart?

Ask the feeling four questions.

• What exactly is it pointing at? “She said her brother was visiting, and then it sounded like he’d cancelled weeks ago” is specific. “Something’s going on” is not.
• Does it hold when I’m calm? Check it after a good night’s sleep or a day with friends. Anxiety rises and falls with your state. A real observation stays put.
• Is it about them, or about the ending? If the feeling sounds like your marriage (“this is how it started last time”), that’s worth noticing.
• Would I say this about anyone? If every person you date sets off the same warning, it’s probably about what happened to you.

What did Hassan decide?

Hassan sat down and wrote it out. What happened: Leila has been texting less this week while helping her mother move. The reading: she’s pulling away. The fear: finding out in a year that she’d been leaving all along. The next step: ask how the move is going and whether she’d like a hand on Saturday.

Before he sent it, he tried something Ethan Kross and Ozlem Ayduk have studied. Their research found that people who think about an upsetting experience from a step back, like a fly on the wall, react less strongly and dwell on it less afterward than people who replay it from the inside.4 Hassan imagined a friend telling him the same story about a new girlfriend. He’d have said, “Her mom’s moving. Offer to carry boxes.”

He did. Leila said yes and that she’d missed him. It was a busy week.

When is it more than worry?

If the alarm runs most of the day, keeps you up at night, makes it hard to work or parent, or keeps you from dating at all, please talk to a licensed therapist. A painful divorce can leave a lasting sense of threat, and a professional can help you separate the old hurt from the present. That’s not overreacting. It’s taking the ending seriously.

What to do this week

• Pick the option above that sounds most like you, and try its next step.
• Write your four lines for the feeling that keeps returning: what happened, the reading, the fear, the next step.
• Find the specific thing, if there is one. If there isn’t, that’s information too.
• Use one of the scripts. Ask about the thing that doesn’t add up, or tell them about your soft spot.
• Notice when hindsight is talking. “I should have seen it” is about your marriage. “What’s happening now?” is about this relationship.

What the research doesn’t tell us

• The hindsight study used written scenarios, not relationships, so it can’t tell you whether your own past signs were clear or not.1
• The divorce figures come from one survey of heterosexual couples, and they say who initiated, not who saw it coming.2
• The attention research measured lab tasks. It shows a tendency in anxious people, not that any one worry of yours is wrong.3
• No article can read your partner’s intentions. Only a calm question and their actions over time can show you that.