How To Know When You Know

A story of my own intuition unleashed

The number one question I get since I’ve gotten divorced is some variation of this: How did you know? How did you REALLY know when it was time? Today I’m going to share my own story of figuring out when I really knew it was time to call it on my marriage.

While the challenge isn’t exclusive to mothers, I have found mothers seem to have the hardest time knowing how to navigate these waters, because the stakes feel especially high with children involved. Couple this with the fact that women raised in religious settings that often squelched their intuition while heightening anxiety and appearance-obsessed living, and you’ve got a tough environment for women to navigate their lives with much sovereignty at all. 

Once when asked the question of “how did I know” I described various stages of knowing. In my experience, the early stages of knowing did not even feel like knowing, I was too inexperienced to recognize it as such. Because of how I was socialized, I treated what I knew as something wrong inside of me that I needed to keep sequestered with the hope that I could starve it out if I ignored it long enough. Engaging it felt dangerous, because what I suspected I knew went against the appearance I was trying to maintain, and, more painfully, my own understanding of what made me a good person. 

I have compared this to keeping something locked up in a box under the bed, pretending it doesn’t exist. That would be an early stage of knowing. You feel something creeping in, but you try your best to pretend it’s not there. Then there may be the stage of taking peeks in the box. For me that translated to sometimes letting my mind explore what not being in my marriage would feel like. I would keep it close, never share that I was giving breathing room to my deep unhappiness, letting it out to roam for bouts of time. There might come a time where you dip your toe in the water of telling a close friend, or listening to a podcast of divorced women. Your curiosity leads you right to what you know.