Lusting After Intuition

By Jeanine Stewart

Know your own happiness. Want for nothing but patience—or give it a more fascinating 

name: Call it hope.  – Jane Austen

Somewhere along the path of singlehood, solitariness begins to take on a life of its own. It squeals to be soothed, nags at me as I walk the half mile to and from work. I try to wriggle free, filling my empty apartment with music at the end of each day, but even the rapturous sounds of classical violins amid the crackle of salmon on the stove cannot muffle that deafening voice of solitude, enveloping me in questions about my barriers to love. It is tactile in its aching, felt all the way through to my neck and shoulders, where the migraines start. I can blame many misfortunes for my singlehood. Yet four decades into life, it is time to plumb the depths of my own heart.

Unfortunately, my heart only offers more questions. Did the social pressures get in the way? What would they have gotten in the way of? Did I know what I wanted? Needed? Amid the fog, I read Jane Austen’s novels, searching her worlds for answers that feel far too elusive in mine. Her characters endure the same struggles, and each time they conquer them, I feel a flicker of hope. If only I had stumbled upon these books much earlier in life, perhaps I could have gathered the seeds to grow my own courage, to trust my intuition over the myriad ways society constructs to keep people apart. Yet did I ever understand my intuition? It feels lost in one of the many heartbreaks. Which one started it?

I caught a glimpse of the culprit when I was 30, unemployed, and using the unlimited pass at the yoga studio—purchased with my meager savings—to garner some sense of normalcy amid the chaos of an endless job search. After one hour-long session of pressing my hands into the ground and my rear toward the ceiling while sweating puddles onto the floor, I exited the studio, and there he was: Edward Talon,* my middle school crush, standing tall in the lobby, conjuring that memory of the gauntlet striking down my faith, all those years ago, that fairy tales can come true.

He had a calming nature that drew me in immediately, and when he was new that seventh-grade year—not yet anchored in any social group outside his soccer team—it seemed he could go anywhere. I struggled to feel excited about school besides English and band class. The rest seemed like an endless examination—either to prove to adults my eligibility to go on living after childhood or to my soccer friends that I could get excited about uninteresting things like polyester shirt trends. 

Band class was a beautiful reprieve. I played the melody on my flute while Edward harmonized a few rows back on his trumpet. After Mrs. George zipped up the song with one last wave of her arms, I’d find myself standing at the door with Edward, Pachelbel’s Canon still prancing through my head. He’d turn to me with his piercing blue eyes and ask, “How are you?” Those words, so rare in our middle school world, felt profound enough to render me nearly speechless, but I’d answer, and we’d go on talking until the bell rang. We both seemed to long for more calm, more patience, more talking than we were afforded.

After months of bathing my friend group in worries that he did not reciprocate my crush, my friend Anne attempted to put me out of my misery by breaking the news that yes, in fact, he did not. She’d asked him, and he’d said no. As the sting of disappointment set in, she insisted it was okay, that he was becoming snobby about all his cool friends, and besides, he did say I was nice. 

I felt frozen in disbelief. Silently, I stewed. Was I repulsive? The most boring person in school? How could his eyes have transmitted such a clear message if it had not been there at all? My mind filled with scenes of the characters in books and movies who failed to accept the reality of romantic rejections, and I cringed to hear my own mind begin to resemble theirs. I didn’t dare voice my protests aloud. Yet still, my two friends privy to the drama sensed my distraction, and they implored me to accept reality.

“Yes, I know,” I’d say as the wheels in my head churned out new questions each second.

My mother insisted there would be other boys; clearly, he did not realize how great I was, and other ones would. Her seeming certainty elicited a dizzying swirl of new questions. How could she be so sure of his feelings when she had not been there? If he really didn’t like me, had I even felt what I felt?

Then I saw Edward standing in the lunch line laughing with a cooler class of kids, and I realized it was time to accept Anne’s message. I felt a bit changed, weathered somehow. Was it then that it happened—the formation of the introjects that haunt me still: that desire for connection is just neediness; that crushes are futile; that my mind’s deep canals and valleys are actually unknowable to anyone but me?

Decades after Edward’s eye contact first soothed me in middle school, we stood there in the yoga studio, lingering on small talk. He looked like a taller version of his middle school self, with a few more muscles; and I too felt physically similar, save the breasts and hips. An inexplicable, familiar comfort radiated. His eyes—the color of the pool I swam in as a teen, where he also swam with another neighborhood boy after I’d taken to ignoring him—still had this sweetness and patience to them that I’ve come to find so rare and precious in men.

When he told me he was engaged to be married, there flashed across his face an undeniable faltering. He went blank, incapacitated by something happening in him, unable to convey excitement or gladness.

“That’s great!” I said.

An uncanny regret emanated as he managed a sad smile. I could feel him searching for more reassurance from me, but I didn’t give it.

“Yeah,” he finally said, coming back to his senses. “It is… It is… So, what have you been up to? How have you been?”

I told him of my untethered life, my plans. He said that was great, and his eyes continued their searching. All I could do was smile.

We had no relationship to reminisce about, nothing more than those short, seventh grade chats at the band room door, which hardly constitute a story. Yet here I am.

If Jane Austen were here with me now, perhaps she could tell me where the intuition went. It was she who demonstrated that sometimes, understanding our own hearts involves a struggle, and accessing our intuition is not so easy after disappointment. It was she who wrote of women who endure disappointment in favor of love, who don’t give up on accessing their intuition, who remain curious about those who provide that rare reprieve from the pressures of life. And it was she who understood the wandering hearts of men who don’t always convey their feelings accurately, whose actions do not demonstrate much sense that they will fall for the heroine—and yet who do in the end. 

*The name has been changed to protect privacy. 

Jeanine Stewart is a social worker in private practice in Philadelphia. Her fiction writing has
appeared in Critica, a psychoanalytic creative magazine. Formerly a journalist covering issues
ranging from land use to undocumented labor, she has published in The Los Angeles Times, The
Peninsula Gateway, New Times San Luis Obispo, The Puget Sound Business Journal, and
Undercurrent News. She now writes about the intersections of love, self knowledge, and the
spaces we claim as sacred. For fun, she likes to read, run long distances, and spend time outside
with friends and family.