David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

David McElroy

Conflicting expectations can kill even the deepest love and hope

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When you start a relationship — especially if it leads to marriage — you assume the other person wants the same things you want.

You’ve probably never even consciously considered what you expect. Your partner hasn’t given much deep thought to what either of you expects. Each one of you comes to the relationship with what you consider to be normal — and that’s what you assume this new partner wants.

When a loving relationship is new and exciting, it’s easy to look past the times when those differing expectations create confusion or even hurt. But the longer you’re with someone — and the cumulative effect of those differing expectations makes one or both of you unhappy — the more tensions surface. And the more you start thinking there’s something deeply flawed with your partner.

What most people don’t realize is that each relationship has unspoken agreements and expectations — and those unacknowledged expectations destroy happiness and make most relationships toxic.

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Briefly: Blue and green can match, even if a stuffy art teacher didn’t think so

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Spring always reminds me how glorious blue skies and green leaves can be. When I was in the second grade, Mrs. Arnold chastised me for using those colors together. She said they didn’t match. Mrs. Arnold had very specific rules about which colors could be used together. We couldn’t deviate from her rules. When I used green and blue together in one of my class drawings, she forced me to do it over, since she said those colors shouldn’t be used together. I was a polite and obedient child, but I asked her why they didn’t match — since God used them together in nature. She was exasperated and told me to follow her rules. So when I see glorious beauty which mixes green and blue — such as this photo I took just outside my office Friday afternoon — it always reminds me of Mrs. Arnold. It reminds me that she was wrong. And it’s a good reminder for us all. There are established rules about a lot of things. Many of those are good rules. But if an expert tells you something and you know he’s wrong, you might need to take a chance. He might be just as mistaken as Mrs. Arnold was.

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Son’s prayer for dying mother awakened emotion for NYC doc

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An emergency room doctor faces death every day, but Dr. Mert Erogul experienced a touching encounter with life this week — as he watched life slipping away from a 100-year-old woman.

Erogul is a physician at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. It’s been a terrible week for medical staffers at hospitals across New York City, as these overworked doctors and nurses care for those afflicted with COVID-19 in addition to their normal work load.

But the story of one patient stands out to Erogul this week.

Among the massive caseload he was dealing with was a 100-year-old Hasidic Jewish woman who had been stricken by COVID-19 and gotten pneumonia. Erogul wanted to get her stable enough to send home — so she could die at home with family — but she was doing so poorly that he couldn’t release her.

After the woman’s blood pressure dropped and Erogul decided to keep her in the hospital, the woman’s son kept calling for an hour to find out how she was doing.

“I finally told him, ‘Look, she’s a hundred years old with pneumonia in both lungs,'” Erogul wrote on a Facebook post. “‘She’s not good. She’s not going to do well.'”

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