Is it anxiety or intuition about someone new?

Intuition usually points at something specific this person did, and it holds steady when you’re rested and calm. Anxiety tends to be about what might happen, gets louder when you’re tired or alone, and often says the same thing about everyone. Later in life your gut has a lot of experience behind it, but a long lonely stretch can turn its volume up.

Why can’t I tell which one it is?

Take Lloyd, 66. He was married for 39 years, and his wife died two years ago. In August he met Nancy in a community choir, and they’ve had dinner three times. She’s warm and funny. And Lloyd has a feeling he can’t name. Some evenings it says “be careful.” Some mornings it’s gone.

His friend Don says, “Trust your gut, it’s never let you down.” His daughter says, “Dad, you’re just nervous, it’s been a long time.” Lloyd suspects they’re both partly right, which isn’t much help.

The trouble is that both feelings live in the same place. Intuition and anxiety can both show up as a knot in the stomach, a tightness, a sense that something’s off. The difference is less in how they feel and more in what they’re about, and in when they turn up.

Is my gut worth listening to at this age?

Often, yes. In research by Joseph Mikels and colleagues at Cornell, older adults made poorer choices than younger ones when they tried to remember and weigh every detail.1 But when they were asked to focus on their feelings about the options, their decisions were just as good as the younger group’s.1 Those were choices between options in a study, not decisions about people. Still, it suggests that your feelings carry information worth taking seriously.

There’s more good news. In a study published in 2010, Igor Grossmann and colleagues asked people of different ages to think through social conflicts. Older people were more likely to consider several points of view, look for compromise and recognize the limits of what they knew.2 Decades of knowing people count for something.

So your gut deserves a hearing. It just needs to be asked the right questions.

Then why does it sometimes feel so wrong?

Because loneliness changes what we notice. The late psychologist John Cacioppo and his colleague Louise Hawkley reviewed research showing that people who feel isolated become more sensitive to social threats, and more likely to find evidence for what they already fear.3 It’s a protective reflex, and it can backfire by keeping people at arm’s length.3

For many people in their sixties, the years after losing a spouse include long quiet evenings. If your unease about someone new gets loudest on a Sunday night in an empty house, that timing is a clue. It doesn’t mean the feeling is wrong. It means it might be the loneliness speaking first.

How can I test the feeling?

Ask it three questions.

What exactly is it pointing at? Intuition usually has an address. “He told me two different reasons he moved here” is specific. “Something about this will go wrong” isn’t. If you can name a moment, a remark or a pattern, write it down.

Does it stay put? Check the feeling at different times: after a good night’s sleep, after lunch with a friend, after a lonely evening. A real observation tends to hold steady. Anxiety rises and falls with your mood and your circumstances.

Would it say this about anyone? If every person you’ve met since your spouse died has set off the same warning, the warning is probably about loss, and the risk of going through it again, rather than about this person.

What did Lloyd find out?

Lloyd wrote down what he had. What happened: Nancy had twice changed plans at short notice. The reading: she isn’t that interested, or she’s hiding something. The fear: being made a fool of, at his age, in front of his children. The next step: ask her about it, plainly.

Then he tried something Ethan Kross and Ozlem Ayduk have studied. Their research found that people who look at an upsetting situation from a step back, like a fly on the wall, react less strongly and dwell on it less afterward than people who replay it from inside.4 Lloyd asked himself: if Don told me this story about a woman he was seeing, what would I say? He’d say, “Have you asked her?”

He asked. Nancy’s sister was in and out of the hospital, and she hadn’t wanted to bring something heavy to their third dinner. The feeling had been pointing at something real. His reading of it had been wrong.

That’s often how it goes. Intuition notices. Anxiety writes the explanation.

What if the feeling won’t settle?

Some unease is worth acting on without debate. If someone new asks for money, pushes you to keep them a secret from your family, or makes you afraid, you don’t need to decide whether it’s intuition. Step back and talk to someone you trust.

And if worry about a new person, or about dating at all, is keeping you up at night for weeks, pulling you away from people you love, or making ordinary days feel heavy, a licensed counselor or your doctor is the right next call. That’s true at any age.

What should I do this week?

• Play the sort above and notice which feelings you hesitated over.
• Write down the one feeling that keeps coming back, with the specific moment it points to, if there is one.
• Check it three times: rested, after company, and alone in the evening. See if it changes.
• Try the fly on the wall. Imagine a good friend telling you the same story, and listen to what you’d tell them.
• Ask one calm question about the specific thing. Then let their answer count.

What the research doesn’t tell us

• The gut-feeling research used choices about options, not people, so it supports listening to feelings, not trusting every one.1
• The reasoning study measured how people think about conflicts, not whether their first impressions of people were right.2
• The loneliness research describes tendencies across groups, and it can’t tell you whether your own unease is accurate.3
• No article can read another person’s intentions. It can only help you tell what you saw from what you’re afraid of.