My intuition scares me

i am writing here very politely because i do not know where else to place this, and because the format asks for honesty without spectacle, which i appreciate, and because i am a woman who has spent years trusting her internal dashboard, my intuition, which has historically shown a low false-positive rate, almost annoyingly accurate, and now it is lighting up red and i am scared by that, not hysterical just concerned, like an analyst watching anomaly detection flags stack up with no clear root cause yet, and the subject is my husband, who i am quite sure is cheating on me even though i have no screenshots no lipstick no credit card receipts, just signals, micro-behaviors, shifts in cadence, metadata in the margins of our life, and yes i know about confirmation bias and availability heuristics and i try to correct for them like any reasonable adult, but my intuition has an audit trail and it has never failed, which makes this moment heavier, because if it is right then my marriage is compromised, and if it is wrong then i am the problem, and neither outcome is great 😕, i notice changes in his communication latency, the way his phone is now always face down which i once read was a “privacy management tactic” in a pop psych article, i notice grooming spikes before mundane errands, cologne at noon, gym shorts for grocery runs, and i tell myself correlation is not causation, very politely i remind myself of that rule, but then there is the tone shift, the politeness surplus toward me that feels like customer service not intimacy, and the absence of conflict which in relationship ops is sometimes a leading indicator of emotional outsourcing, i hate even typing that, it sounds dramatic, but i am trying to stay detached and objective, to speak in facts and probabilities not vibes, and still the vibe is screaming, my intuition is screaming, and that scares me more than the idea of cheating itself, because i have always relied on that internal compass for risk assessment, and now it is pointing somewhere i do not want to go, there are references people love to throw around like “trust your gut” or “the body keeps the score” and i have quoted those myself in other contexts, but when the gut implicates the person you built your life with, the advice feels cruel, like a systems alert you cannot mute, i have replayed conversations like call recordings, transcribed his words, noted semantic drift, affectionate language replaced by logistical phrasing, “let me know” instead of “i’ll be there”, and yes maybe this is just stress or aging or market volatility in a long-term partnership, i am open to that hypothesis, i would prefer it honestly, i am being very reasonable here i think, but my intuition keeps surfacing edge cases, the late meetings with vague deliverables, the sudden interest in data privacy, passcodes changing, and when i ask neutral questions i get what feels like over-explained answers, which any negotiator will tell you can be a leakage point, i am not angry, not yet, mostly i am tired and afraid and trying to remain courteous to myself and to him while i gather more information, because rash action has a high cost, and still at night i lie awake doing mental A/B testing of futures, one where i am right and must decide how to proceed with dignity, and one where i am wrong and must apologize for doubting, and both scenarios require emotional capital i am not sure i have, i keep thinking of a line i read somewhere, maybe a book maybe a tweet, “intuition is just pattern recognition trained by experience,” and if that is true then what pattern am i recognizing now, and why does it feel so urgent, so sharp, so unlike anxiety, more like clarity 😔, i am venting here because anonymity lowers the social risk and because i wonder, very politely, has anyone else had an intuition that scared them not because of what it said about their partner but because of what it forced them to confront about reality, and did you ignore it, did you validate it, did you run more tests or did you shut the system down, i am genuinely asking, because i am standing between data and denial and i do not know which is more dangerous right now.

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