Should you trust your gut?
The Situation: Although the beginning of your relationship was like a fairy tale, you and your boyfriend have been going through a rough patch. He's become distant and seems distracted. But in your heart, you know that you'll stay together.
The Outcome: Your boyfriend tells you that he cares about you but needs some time and space to figure things out. So you wait (and wait), because you remember how good things were in the beginning.
"There's something called the anchoring trap, which causes you to pay attention to the first information your receive rather than to the whole picture," says Srinivasan Pillay, M.D., an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School and the author of Life Unlocked: 7 Revolutionary Lessons to Overcome Fear. Because of the connection you had at the beginning, you could have relationship blinders on.
So does that mean your intuition was off? Not necessarily. Your boyfriend might have had feelings that matched your own, but he could be struggling with accepting them. "A lot of people actually ignore their gut feelings because there are no facts to back them up," says Pillay. "They consider their instinct to be a hypothesis."
You could wait, but the reality is this: "The person who isn't sure might never become sure," warns Pillay.
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