Man who’s leaving infertile wife thinks world revolves around him

By David McElroy · February 3, 2018

Josh was already sitting at a table when I came into the restaurant late Saturday afternoon. He had finished eating and was drinking a beer as he watched a basketball game.

I wanted to watch the same game, so I ended up at the table next to him. We chatted off and on about the game as it went along. He was friendly and didn’t seem to have a care in the world. At halftime, though, something came up about marriage — and he mentioned that he just left his wife today. He wasn’t wearing a ring.

I cautiously responded that he didn’t seem to be very upset about it.

“Yeah, it’s not really a big deal,” he said. “We’ve been married for four years and it turns out she can’t have a baby. Just found out for sure this week. I want to have kids to carry on the family name, so I told her I have to cut it off with her and find another wife. I hate it, because I loved her.”

He said everything so calmly that I couldn’t be sure he was serious. But the more he talked, the more he seemed like a monster.

“She can’t put a bun in that oven, but the oven sure is getting bigger,” he said. “Know what I mean? She was skinny and hot when we first hooked up, but she’s getting pretty chunky — and I really don’t want to be with someone who looks like that anyway. So it’s for the best, you know?”

I felt sick.

And I had no idea what to say to this smiling narcissist who thinks the world revolves around him. His selfishness quickly left me thinking the woman he’s leaving is the lucky one. Maybe she never realized what a terrible person she had married. He doesn’t want children in order to love and nurture them. He wants children because of how they reflect on him — as though they’re extensions of himself in the world. (This is a classical sign of malignant narcissism.)

I wanted to lecture Josh. I wanted to tell him he was completely confused about what love and marriage are about. But that felt out of place for me to say. So I stayed quiet and left as soon as I could finish eating. I listened to the rest of the game on the radio in my car.

I haven’t been able to get this guy off my mind in the four or five hours since then. I’ve alternated between feeling sick and feeling angry.

If anybody understands the strong desire to have children, it’s me. I’ve spoken of this many times, so if you know me, you know how much I want children.

But love shouldn’t be disposable. Not if it’s real.

There are good reasons for a marriage to end — and I think a lot of people stay in miserable marriages for the wrong reasons — but the lack of ability to have children isn’t one of those reasons.

If I met a woman and knew she couldn’t have children, I would avoid falling in love with her — and I would certainly never promise her a future together. But if I fell in love with a woman and had committed myself to her — whether we were married yet or not — I would be willing to sacrifice my desire for kids in exchange for the connection of love and understanding with her.

Isn’t that what love is supposed to be?

I was also astonished by the callous way that Josh — not his real name, by the way — casually rejected his wife’s body because of some apparent weight gain. In a perfect world, we would all have perfect bodies and be perfect in every other way, but in the real world, imperfections come along with pretty much everybody. (I’m probably more sensitive about this issue since I’ve struggled with weight over the years.)

And if you claim to love a woman, you accept her and value her and give her love and security — whether she gains some weight or can’t have the children you want.

There are a lot of things I want in life. Children are high on my list. But as much as I want kids, I would be willing to cheerfully give up that desire to live a life of love and understanding with the woman I love.

If you truly fall in love with someone — and commit yourself to that person — you’re willing to sacrifice for the sake of the relationship. For Josh, the world was all about himself. For someone who is in love, the world is all about what’s best for the two of you together.

If love is real, sacrifice is natural — and if love is real, the sacrifice will be worth it.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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