David McElroy

I hate weddings, so I’m not sure why I agreed to go to one Saturday afternoon. But Kristen had invited me to go with her to several events in recent months and I’d declined them all. On a whim, I accepted this invitation, even though I wouldn’t know a soul there except my date.

The small country church was overflowing with a couple hundred people. I’d never been to this small rural community. I felt like an anthropologist trying to quietly disappear into the crowd of a tribe he was studying. But were they the aliens? Or was that me?

While we were on the way to the church, Kristen told me the couple’s story. The bride has never been married but has a 5-year-old daughter. The groom is the only son in a family that owns a couple of auto parts stores. The bride claims the pair had been dating “off and on” for awhile. The groom says it was just casual sex every now and then, but she got pregnant.

Angry parents were soon involved. The groom’s family insisted on an abortion. The bride’s family demanded a wedding. There were threats made all around. And now a semi-fancy wedding had been thrown together in just weeks.

I knew all of that going in — and Kristen told me everybody knew — but what I was about to see was a theatrical performance that defied all reality.

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I had just left work Friday afternoon when I noticed clouds gathering to the west. The sun was about 20 minutes from sinking beneath the horizon, so I thought there might be a good sunset. I made a detour to the top of Shades Mountain and found a perfect spot from which to watch a glorious sunset.

Afterwards, I went straight to dinner. I looked through my photos and picked the one I liked best. As I sat there looking at a full-screen copy of the shot, I wanted to share it with someone. It wasn’t out of pride about my work. The desire came from excitement about the beauty of what I’d just experienced.

And there was nobody who I wanted to share with. That made me feel very much alone.

In that moment, I realized in a painful way how much I miss having a partner with whom to share the routine details of daily life. I miss having someone who wants to hear what happened in my day — and I miss listening to the mundane thoughts and experiences of a woman I love.

If you don’t love someone, listening to such things is a chore. If you do love someone, it’s a privilege.

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For years, I assumed everybody felt the way I did. I wasn’t even quite conscious of the need for a long time. It was just a vague hunger that I felt — more strongly with an occasional person — to be understood.

When I could finally put it into words, I realized that I often felt invisible. I didn’t feel understood. I didn’t feel that anyone saw my worth in the ways I needed it to be seen. I didn’t need for everyone to see me and to understand me. But from certain people — who rarely came along — I craved something which was hard to put into words.

I wanted love. Acceptance. To be seen. To be understood. I wanted for someone who I saw as my equal to be able to see me in the same way.

I eventually discovered this isn’t a universal need. Most people don’t seem to care that much about being understood. And after a lot of reading and therapy and thinking, I finally realized that my fierce need was related to a very old abandonment wound.

I wasn’t even aware the wound was there, but it was changing the relationships I cared about the most.

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