Once upon a time, I wanted a relationship with someone I decided would be perfect for me. I imagined myself happily and successfully finding lasting love. No one else appealed to me once we met and started dating. So, with my regular set of essential relationship-seeking tools—Must Haves, Can’t Stands, Love Languages, 36 questions, etc.—I went after this wearing an attractive pair of rose-colored glasses.

Even with all these powerful tools at work, recognizing the difference between real—gut level—intuition and false negative self-talk, is very tricky. Which is illusion and which is reality?

What happens to us when we turn off intuitive flags mistaken for negative thinking? Suddenly we don’t follow our own best knowing and end up down a road we didn’t mean to turn on.

This can happen in every aspect of our lives. We meet someone and want them to be Ms./Mr. Right, so we see them through the potential we hope for. Or we want our children to be this way or that, so we overlook hints of trouble when they show up.

Perhaps the light of our hopeful vision creates blind spots. When we look ahead into a bright sunny day, we sometimes must shade our eyes to improve our vision. Wanting something without filtering our view through our own intuitive knowing blinds us to what we don’t want to see. We can’t let our desires overpower this directional compass.

Hindsight often reveals information that was in front of us, hidden in our intuition, but we chose to overlook it in favor of hopeful thinking like giving someone the benefit of the doubt. We look back and say, “I should have trusted my doubts instead of believing him.”

The knowing is in the overlooked intuition, or “gut feeling.” So, the best thing we can do is to learn to recognize when our intuition is trying to be heard and take time to listen to our own questioning.

Charles Dickens wrote, “Love is in all things a most wonderful teacher.”

In the end, falling in love with him was the best thing that never happened to me.