Impulse Screams “Fight for Love” But Intuition Whispers “Let Them Go”

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He was breaking up with me. I could tell by the sudden shift in tone. We were laughing together, and then everything changed. My impulse was to stop him — to do anything and everything to prevent the thing I feared from coming to pass. I wanted to remind him that I loved him, to beg him to stay, and to somehow convince him of my worth. But my intuition had another idea entirely.

Instead, I would let him leave if he wanted to go. I would accept his choice when everything inside me wanted to scream, cry, and beg for any other result but this one. That small inner voice insisted that I could not make him love me. I could not convince him we belonged together if he didn’t feel it. And frankly, I was done — at a bone-deep level — of having to convince anyone to see me, know me, and love me.

There’s impulse, and there’s intuition. They aren’t the same.

I could see, on one hand, that making a last-ditch effort to keep the relationship would make me feel like I was achieving something. I could at least say I tried, right? Only my intuition reminded me that begging someone to love me would not make me feel better in the long term.

If I’d begged and he stayed, I would always know that he wanted to go and had to be convinced not to leave. If I begged and he still left, I would feel doubly rejected. There was no upside to trying to change the outcome. He’d already decided what he would do. He’d decided it long before that day, and nothing I was going to say or do would change his mind.

I look back and feel so grateful that I honored my intuition over my impulse. I was able to leave with my dignity intact. My heart was broken, but my sense of self remained strong. I hadn’t begged yet another man who wanted to leave to stay instead. I hadn’t gone into a pitch of how I could be an incredible partner. I saw, I listened, and I accepted. And I knew, without the faintest shadow of a doubt, that it was the right thing to do.

Impulse can often be dictated by our emotions and what feels right in the moment. Intuition tells us what’s good for us even when it’s not what we want. I can see the whole scene play out the other way, and I know it would only have made the breakup harder on both of us. The impulse of the moment would have given way to shame, embarrassment, and regret.

From the outside looking in, it can be difficult to tell the two apart. What seems like an impulse to someone else might be our deeper intuition informing our actions. The only way to know for sure is to pay attention. Are we acting on pure emotion with little thought, or are we trusting a deeper, wiser knowledge?

Intuition is sure, but it’s not always loud.

Instead, it’s persistent. It doesn’t change on a whim. It keeps telling us exactly what we need to know.

I’ve had moments of knowing that someone presented danger to me. I don’t know why. I’ll never know why because I honored that sense of disquiet at my core. I got out because my entire system was signaling that someone or something about the situation was unsafe. My intuition has saved my ass time and time again.

My impulse has landed me in embarrassing situations.

It’s when we lose our tempers over a customer service issue only to discover we’re thoroughly in the wrong. It’s letting someone back into our lives we know will only repeat their mistakes and hurt us again. It’s seeing a red flag and proceeding anyway because we like the attention and the spark of chemistry we get from it. Impulse can have us begging a man to stay who will only feel sorry for us and leave anyway.

Impulse isn’t logical. It can’t be trusted. Intuition is a deeper knowledge. We may not always understand the how or why of it, but we know that it’s right even when we don’t want to admit it.

Sometimes, we keep asking other people for advice because we’re hoping it will help us feel better about choosing our emotional reaction over our deeper wisdom. We think if we poll enough people, one of them will tell us what we want to hear. We’re not looking for the best advice. We’re just looking for the one that fits with what we’re already tempted to do — even when we know it’s the wrong decision. So much of the time we do this and decide we’ll deal with the consequences later.

And the consequences are always worse than we feared.

Intuition doesn’t work like that. It might be the harder choice — the less rewarding one at the moment. But it doesn’t mess us up later. It doesn’t make us pay for a single moment over and over again.

I look at myself in that moment with my phone clutched in white knuckles, silent tears streaming down my face. I remember that feeling running through me, the intense desire to say the thing that would convince him to love me back — and the solid intuition that nothing I could say would accomplish that. I felt grief but embraced acceptance. Loving him well meant letting him go. It meant ignoring the impulse to hold on and honoring the intuition that I don’t ever have to beg someone who truly loves me to stay and share a life with me.

I look back and feel at peace. There was an impulse, and there was intuition. I might always miss him, but I know that accepting his choice in the face of powerful, overwhelming emotions was the healthiest thing I could do.

I learned from it. Now, I pay attention to the impulse, but I trust the intuition. It’s the voice looking out for me beyond the moment I’m living.

Originally published on Medium