David McElroy

There are few things scarier than letting your guard down enough to accept love from another person — especially if you secretly fear you don’t deserve to be loved.

We all want to be loved. Most of us say we want a healthy and happy relationship. So we plant seeds and eagerly watch for love to grow. When the buds of love start growing, our warm hearts believe we’ve found what we’ve been looking for. We feel joy and happiness.

So why do so many of us find ways to block love at that point? Why do we feel panic when it’s time to accept what’s being offered? Why do we find excuses to slam the door in the face of the one who says, “I really love you and I accept you as you are?”

I see this pattern in other people pretty easily. It’s easy for me to smugly point my finger at another’s mistakes — but it’s humbling and horrifying when I realize I’ve made the same arrogant mistake.

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I used to be arrogant enough to believe that my death one day would be front page news all over the world.

I imagined all the great things I would have done by the time I died — the political power I had won, the businesses I had built and the influence I had had — and I thought that many millions would mourn me. I even thought I’d make the history books.

I have a very different view today of my obituary. I haven’t yet had the great success of my fantasies — not yet — but a summary of my life would sound interesting and successful. I had a wonderful run in newspapers, starting from reporter and quickly rising to publisher. I got into politics by accident and had a couple of decades of financial success getting candidates elected to powerful positions. I’ve owned small companies. I’ve made money and lost it. The story would be colorful.

But the one thing I now realize is most important to this earthly life would be missing. If I died today — which I certainly don’t expect anytime soon — a brutally honest obituary might say, “A lot of people liked him. A number of people will miss him. But he died without anybody who loved him. He died alone, with no family.”

And that feels like failure.

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Something about today’s date felt oddly familiar to me this evening. It seemed as though it used to be important. Who did I associate it with?

And then it hit me. It was her birthday.

It’s really hard to explain my relationship with her. I’ve written about it before, so I’m not going to rehash it. But her birthday has me thinking about that again. And about other relationships. And about love itself.

Why are my memories of love so mixed? I’ve experienced some of my greatest joys in love, but my deepest agonies and hurts have also come from love and its aftermath. I need love, but the fear of being hurt again is so awful that it’s devastating.

The woman whose birthday is today is happily married and we haven’t spoken for a very long time. She eventually realized that I would never love her. She wasn’t willing to be my second choice. And she was wise enough to walk away instead of remaining my “back-up plan.”

Why is it that one person usually loves more than the other? And why do those relationships hurt the worst?

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