David McElroy

My friend asked the question out of the blue. I was spending the night with my friend, Larry, and I was lying on a twin bed in the corner of his room.

“What do you think about your mom being gone?” he asked.

It didn’t strike me as a difficult or important question, but something about the experience has burned everything about it into my memory. I was about 10 or 11 years old. Although my mother had been away from us off and on for years, the divorce had been final only for a year or two. She had no custody or official visitation.

I considered Larry’s question for a long moment. I felt very cold. Very hard. There was no emotion in my voice.

“I couldn’t care less if she moved to the Sahara Desert,” I said.

That’s all I said and Larry didn’t ask any more. It’s a good thing, because I might have cried if he had pushed to know what I meant. I was confused. I couldn’t tell if I felt nothing or if I felt more than I could handle. I swept the feelings under a rug in my heart — and I left them there.

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Valentine’s Day in this culture is all about love stories and feel-good fantasy. But what about those of us who don’t have love — those of us whose hearts are broken by need and emptiness?

For me, love has been closely associated with painful longing recently. I’m torn about what to think about this, because I feel something strongly that I perceive as the truth, but some psychologists and writers say that’s not healthy.

“Deep painful longing, yearning and craving are not characteristics of love,” writes Shari Schreiber, for instance. “If you think they are, you were emotionally programmed to believe this in childhood, when you couldn’t get your adoration for mother returned.”

If I’m deceiving myself about love, then our culture is filled with music from people who are similarly deceived by their longing. For Valentine’s Day, I’ve created a list of 10 songs that fall into that category. These aren’t songs about happy love. These are songs for those of us who are alone — and who are longing for love we can’t have.

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If you want to see the moral bankruptcy of the modern progressive left, the UK’s Guardian newspaper is often a good place to find it.

After the successful launch of an innovative new rocket by SpaceX this week, the intellectual rot was on full display at the Guardian Wednesday with an article called, “Why Elon Musk’s SpaceX launch is utterly depressing.”

The brilliantly successful launch and landing are depressing, according to the article, because there are people with basic needs around the world, so a billionaire such as Musk has no right to go spending his money on something the writer considers frivolous.

The writer laments that wealth isn’t “distributed fairly,” which he says is the only reason Musk has his billions.

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