I’ve never claimed to be psychic, and sometimes I’m not certain I believe in the ability to predict the future. However, during the summer before my junior year of high school, a girlfriend of mine, Julie, wanted to have her palm read. As I’m usually up for anything, I went along with her.
The psychic was off the main road in downtown Columbus, Indiana. Her “office” was the living room of her home, and when we knocked on her front door she was watching a rousing episode of Full House.
We each paid for a palm reading, half the price of a tarot card session—I’m too scared I’ll get the death card—and Julie went first. I can’t recall what she told Julie, but I will never forget what she told me.
I told her my birthday as she felt my right hand on both sides, touching the lines and the bones. She told me my parents would get a divorce. She also told me that she knew I was struggling between two career paths.
I was, part of me wanted to continue with dance and be a choreographer, while the other part of me wanted to write, and go wherever that would take me. She told me to go with dance.
Finally, she told me that I had a soul mate. He was blonde, tall, and tan. He also had the initials J, C, S, in any order.
We left the old house and analyzed what we heard. My parents weren’t getting a divorce, so I didn’t know how much thought I should invest in the career suggestion or my supposed soul mate. Nonetheless, it was nice to think about a tall, tan, blonde guy waiting for me somewhere in the world.
About a month later, my dad moved out.
While I don’t think a psychic can map out all of the details of our futures, all of us have that gut feeling when something is or isn’t right. Several times in the past, I’ve ignored that feeling, and I always regret it. As I get older, I’ve learned to listen to those feelings and go with my instincts. The outcome is always better.
When it comes to dating, listening to your gut is especially important. I’d venture to say 95% of my dating problems have occurred because I’ve ignored those feelings. In the beginning of a relationship, when everything is fun and exciting, maybe my new guy will do something that seems off, and doesn’t quite fit.
I used to ignore those signs, and say, “Oh, it’s not that big of a deal,” when really, it is a huge deal, and it becomes a massive problem days, months, or even years down the line.
I’m not talking about the way he holds his knife at a nice restaurant or his habit of telling corny jokes, I’m talking about flirting with the waitress (or every woman in sight), doing a bump of cocaine, cheating on his ex with you, etc. The stuff that should be taken seriously, but sometimes it isn’t because you just want things to work.
When my ex of three years tried to dump me via email and phone call, I knew the bad news was coming. However, I demanded he respect me and say it to my face. The fact that I even had to ask for respect while he dumped me is a problem in itself.
Although his prepared speech was about how he just wasn’t feeling it anymore, I knew he had been cheating on me and was dumping me to be with someone else. Suddenly, visions of times I’d ignored popped into my head—him talking about her at dinner, him buying wine for her at the grocery—I don’t know why I hadn’t connected the dots sooner.
I told him this and of course, he denied it. I said, “Oh, how convenient that you’re breaking up with me just in time for the weekend,” and he also denied that having anything to do with it. But I knew the truth. I ripped my house key from his grip and pointed to my front door.
“I hope you’ll answer when I call,” he said.
I shut the door in his face.
Although the breakup was completely necessary, I had a rough time. Friends from all over, even from high school reached out to send me kind messages and share their stories of breakups and love gone wrong with me.
One classmate in particular, Ashley, had several stories for me, and they all comforted me in different ways. She sent me an email one morning after she woke up from a dream (or perhaps a nightmare) that she was marrying her ex boyfriend, and the night before their wedding, he called to tell her he couldn’t do it. She was calling him an hour before the wedding, he wouldn’t answer his phone, and that’s when she woke up.
“I thought my world was coming to an end when my ex broke up with me,” she told me the next day. “I can still remember how it went. He sat down and asked me to come sit by him, because we needed to talk. I knew this wasn’t going to be a good talk.
In that moment, I knew two things: 1., I knew he was breaking up with me, and 2. I knew why he was breaking up with me.
I sat down and looked into his eyes and said, ‘It’s Nikki isn’t it?’ He said no right away, but a woman just knows these things. That’s when the waterworks started, and they weren’t mine.
I didn’t want to be near him. I think I could have beaten him half to death, and I think he would have let me. The guilt he felt still haunts him today. I know because he and I were friends long before we dated, and now the man can’t even look at me.”
One of my best friends, Sheena, has such a strong gut feeling, sometimes it has lead her to the wildest dating stories I’ve ever heard, much less imagined.
Around the time I was with my destructive, cheating ex, Sheena was dating this guy Jeff. Some of the things she told me about him set my radar off, but as her friend I wanted to support her when she was happy, and just be there for her when she needed it.
The beginning of their relationship seemed normal enough, although one night she caught him doing cocaine, which she didn’t approve of. When she confronted him about it, he said he only did it twice a year. She accepted that and moved on.
As you’d expect, he did it more than that, and it just got swept under the rug. However, he was really into partying hard, and Sheena really isn’t. Sometimes, he’d go out without her, drink himself stupid, and ignore her attempts to find him. One night, Sheena called me in a frenzy, and she was driving around her college town looking for his car. She had this feeling he was with his classmate, Amy.
“They’d been in the same Italian class for two or three years, were from the same area, and they were friends,” she told me. “She would come over sometimes while I was at his place, drop off notes, or they would study together. He even took me by her house one night because he had to drop off the Italian textbook they shared, and then we carried on with our evening.”
The night Sheena called me was a month after all of this. Jeff had gathered a group of his friends, and Sheena, to see a movie that was coming out at midnight. However, Sheena wasn’t feeling well, so she went home for the night around 6 pm, telling Jeff to call her later.
“We really didn’t talk the whole night, which was strange,” she said. “I called him around 11, before he was leaving for the movie and he was really weird on the phone. He was very short with me and not acting like he was talking to his girlfriend, which gave me a bad feeling.
So I stayed up until 2:30 or 3 a.m., when I thought the movie would be out and I called him 3 or 4 times throughout the next 30-45 minutes and no no answer. Then, I had my roommate and his roommate call, and they got no answer either.
Since he lived across the street, all I had to do was walk over there to see he wasn’t home and somehow, I just knew he was at that girl’s place. So, I got in my car and drove over there and sure enough, there sat his car in her driveway.
To make sure he actually stayed there, I got up at 8 the next morning and drove by again, and his car was still there. I drove by again at 10:30 and it was still there. Of course, when I asked him what he did, and why he didn’t go home, he lied and said he stayed at his friend Jeremy’s. When I told him I knew he stayed at the girl’s place, he hung up on me and didn’t talk to me for three days.”
At that point, Sheena and Jeff had been dating for three months.
“So awful,” she said. “I should’ve dropped his ass then.”
Unfortunately, Sheena’s gut instinct had to kick in a few more times before she dropped Jeff for good. Several months later, I got a call from Sheena as she was making an early morning investigative trip to Jeff’s house.
“We had gotten in an argument the day before because I was going to Indianapolis to have dinner with my mom and sister, and he never came to my family shit, but I always went to his, so we were pissed at each other, but made up before I left town.
I was weary to leave because he was a bastard and I figured he’d go out and get super drunk and do something stupid.
He was replying to some texts but they were weird and when I called him, I could tell he was really fucked up and he was just like, ‘Come to this bar,’ (knowing I wasn’t in town) and it was around 1:30 or 2 a.m.
Then after that whenever I called and texted him after the bars closed he didn’t respond., which to me was an indication he was with another girl or otherwise he would’ve picked up.”
Sheena called me the next morning, driving from Indianapolis to West Lafayette, on a mission to catch Jeff cheating.
“So, I walked in his front door and saw high heels sitting outside of his room.
I could’ve walked away then fully knowing he had a girl in his room, but I still wanted to see it for myself. So, I walked in his room and his eyes shot open and I walked around the bed so that I could see the girl in front of me, threw up my hands, and walked out.
He said nothing.”
Although Sheena didn’t trust Jeff after that, she gave him one final chance. I can’t blame her, because I did the same thing with my ex. But one event finally happened that broke the camel’s back.
“We were hanging out in the afternoon and he was texting this girl from his hometown that went to college with us that I was also friends with. I think they had a class together or something.
He told me they were texting about the class. I had to go to work in Indianapolis that night, so I was about to leave and wouldn’t be back until like 10 pm, it was probably like 4 pm at this point.
So, I leave and text him a few times while I’m there and when I get back he’s not answering my calls or texts, so I go over to his house. One of his friends was sitting on his front porch waiting for his roommate and I asked him if he had seen Jeff and he said no, so I left.
So I went home and stewed about it. This was when we were on the same cell plan, so I went home and logged on and saw that he had been texting this girl the whole time I was gone and at around 8 pm their texts stopped.
I continued to call and text him throughout the night and got no response. Finally around midnight, I told him if he didn’t respond I was calling his parents because I was worried something happened to him. He responded that he was fine.
That was when I knew he was with another girl. The next day, I called him and he was playing video games with someone, so he was very short, I said, ‘I know you were with Ally last night’ (at this point, I didn’t know they had gone out to dinner) he didn’t deny it, and told me he’d have to call me back later.
An hour after that, I got on Facebook and saw that he took our relationship down. I later found out that this was because he lied to the girl and told her we were already broken up.
He never gave me an explanation or told me what happened, but of course this girl had a big mouth and told all of my friends that he took her to this super nice, expensive sushi place and got bottles of wine, and then they went over to the guy’s house who was sitting on Jeff’s front porch waiting for his roommate for a bon fire and beers, and then like a week later one of the girl’s roommates told me she walked in ally’s room in the morning and Jeff was naked in her bed.”
Sheena hasn’t talked to Jeff since.
Although your intuition might not lead you to something as wild as what I and my friends came to find, but it’s important not to ignore the feelings. There’s a reason you don’t feel right about something. Or, perhaps you have a feeling that something is just so right. After all, they say when you know it’s the one, you just know.
I can still remember my first Valentine.
