What Can Psychics Truly Reveal About Your Love Life?
*Article from Lexington Lines Autumn/Winter 2023 Issue, pages 32-34
Check out the full issue here.
When you’re in a relationship, revealing the truth to your partner can be hard. Would it help to have a psychic do it for you?
For Angelina, it just created more turmoil.
The 21-year-old New Yorker first met Carlos when they worked together at Toscana 49, an upscale Italian restaurant in midtown Manhattan. They hit it off and began seeing each other outside of work.
“Everything was great with Carlos. He truly made me fall for him in a matter of a couple weeks,” Angelina says. “From fancy restaurant dates to baseball games, and even a Central Park picnic.”
Angelina and Carlos’s relationship was new and exciting. Neither of them thought anything could disrupt their honeymoon phase.
But everyone has a past, and Angelina’s began to resurface. One day she received an unexpected ping on her phone from Axl, an ex-situationship.
“I miss you.”
Her casual relationship with Axl had ended nine months before she met Carlos. But now Axl confessed he wanted to date her seriously even though he knew she was seeing Carlos. The texting continued, and one day, Carlos saw Axl’s name on her phone and knew who it was. She played it down, but Carlos remained suspicious.
“Yes, the conversation was flirtatious,” Angelina remembers. “But does that equate to cheating?”
A few days later, Carlos texted Angelina saying he knew exactly what she and Axl had been saying to each other. And he was right. How did he know?
According to Carlos, a psychic told him.
There are more than 200 working psychics in New York City, according to The Fast Law Firm. They are required to present themselves as “entertainers,” according to Vice, because claiming to accurately predict the future is illegal in New York. But often, their customers are after something more than entertainment.
According to Carlos, his psychic was able to provide verbatim a text exchange between Angelina and Axl. In particular, he was concerned that Angelina had told Axl, “I can’t stop thinking about our conversation last night.”
Was there really a psychic? Nobody knows but Carlos. Many of Angelina’s friends suspect that Carlos snooped through her phone. When I heard the story, I wasn’t sure either, but it piqued my interest when it came to psychics—were they really that specific? I decided to see two and compare the results.
First, I entered a woman’s apartment on 47th Street, and as I walked in, an aroma of lavender incense hit me. Dim, moody lighting was accented by a variety of crystals and books lining the back wall.
I opted for a palm reading. Palm readers use the lines on our hands to “offer guidance and predictions about a person’s life,” according to West Texas A&M University.
She led me to a room with two large purple chairs separated by a circular glass table. I sat down, and she asked me to lay my palms face up on the table.
The reading began with many brief, generic assessments.
“You’re an old soul,” she told me. “You will get married at 24.”
Looking closer at my palms, the psychic began to discuss people in my love life. Apparently, my heart chakra is blocked.
The heart chakra, also known as Anahata chakra, is the fourth primary chakra and “serves as a person’s center of love for oneself and others, compassion, empathy, and forgiveness,” according to the wellness website Mind Body Green.
“You have a negative energy around you,” the psychic explained. She told me I won’t be able to “allow love in” if I continue to let negativity wash over me.
The psychic handed me a rose quartz crystal and advised me to meditate with it each night, which would allow my chakra to open up.
Sounded promising. Was it true? I saw another psychic to confirm and provided the same prompt—that I wanted to learn more about myself when it come to love and relationships. This psychic gave me a completely different reading.
“These are your years of finding love,” the petite, middle-aged woman told me.
She encouraged me to put myself out into the dating scene because “my soulmate is waiting for me.”
Contrary to the first psychic, she told me my heart chakra is open, and a romantic interest will soon find me.
The psychics contradicted each other, and certainly neither was able to give me the exact verbiage of any text I have ever sent, received, or tangentially cared about.
Seemingly, psychic readings are based upon faith and some amount of motivated reasoning—a person who wants to believe a psychic is more likely to do so. Could it be that professional psychics are good at reading people and telling them what they want or need to hear?
Maybe. So what do we do with Carlos? Did a psychic really know exactly what Angelina texted to her ex? Should we all see psychics to uncover truths that our partners are concealing from us?
Hard to say. For me, it was a nice chance to consider how open I am to receiving love in my life—to take the question seriously. But if a psychic really told Carlos exactly what Axl and Angelina were saying to each other, then she clearly had a line on something my psychics did not.