Weddings are triumphs of love
and hope over reasonable fears

By David McElroy · April 24, 2018

The world is a scary place today.

It’s always been a scary place, but we are more aware of the dangers than ever before. Several centuries ago, humans had to contend with disease and death and dangers, but those things seemed confined to a small area. They didn’t know what was going on elsewhere. Their village was their world.

Today, we worry about some madman blowing the world up with nuclear weapons. We worry about men with bombs who have no personal argument with us showing up in our cities and blowing us up. We worry about the erosion of culture and values and all sorts of things which people of the past didn’t even understand.

But despite all those things, we still fall in love. We still get married. We still raise children. Every single one of these things is a bet we place on a better future — not on the fear and despair which are so often on the lips of naysayers.

Every new marriage is a triumph of hope and faith about the future.

As I drove home from work this evening, I was next to a car on I-459 in Birmingham which had “just married” crudely scrawled on the side. Everything about it was a cliche. You’ve seen it a thousand times. But something about it made me feel warm hope inside — just as it always does.

The couple in the car looked happy. They appeared to be in their 30s. They didn’t seem to have a care in the world.

I know that will change, because troubles are common to all of us. They might end up unhappy. They might eventually divorce. They might have financial problems and fight. He might cheat on her. She might cheat on him. They might have a child die. They might deal with bankruptcy or death or war or natural disaster.

There are a million things that might go wrong in the future for them. But right now, they’re happy. They’ve each placed a bet on the other for the future. They’ve each said, “I choose to build my life around you.”

A completely rational person wouldn’t do any of these things. He wouldn’t marry unless it was for an alliance with someone with more resources. He wouldn’t have children. He wouldn’t do anything but provide for his own pleasures and build nothing for the future.

Instead, we’re wired to fall in love.

Love drives us to do all these things. Love drives us to trust another human and to place a bet on that person. And when that bet fails — as it often does — love causes us to place a bet on someone else — even when experience says, “You’re a sucker if you think it will be different.” Love causes us to have children and to nurture them. Love makes us work hard for their welfare and try to make the world better for them.

Yes, the world is scary. Terrible things might happen. Politicians will disappoint us. Evil and selfish people will hurt us. Even the people we trust will sometimes betray us.

But we’re wired for love. We keep coming back to love. We need love and understanding and intimacy. Despite a world that might otherwise make us decide to lock our doors and ignore everybody, love drives us forward to something better.

Love changes the world by making us act in irrational ways.

I don’t know the newly married couple I saw on the road this evening. I’ll never see them again. But in a way, they represent the best of all of us. They represent our willingness to suspend our fears and doubts and even nihilism. They represent our need for connection and emotional intimacy.

They represent the best in all of us, because they remind us that love changes everything — at least long enough for us to place bets on making the world a better place for our children.

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I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

Narcissists tend to turn their children into narcissists — and since a narcissist doesn’t realize he or she is a narcissist, there’s no bad intent. How does this happen? I watched a YouTube video over the weekend from an Australian psychologist who does a nice job of summarizing how it works. None of this is new to me, but I thought it was useful for those who haven’t spent years digging through books and articles about it. The same psychologist has an excellent summary of something which confuses a lot of people about narcissism. You’ve all seen examples of the loud, boisterous and overbearing narcissist, but what about the ones who are more introverted and vulnerable? This type is called a covert narcissist (or a vulnerable narcissist), and this is what my father was. In the first video, I strongly see myself in the ways my father treated me and in the second video, I see what my father was almost successful in making me become.

It’s National Dog Day in the U.S. and Lucy is here to remind you to go express love and appreciation to your favorite canine. Not only does your doggie friend give you love and affection, but he or she also protects your home from intruders — such as birds, squirrels, mail carriers and other undesirables who deserve to be barked at vigorously. Where would we be without that? And if you think this service is actually unnecessary, ask yourself how long it’s been since your home was the victim of a vicious squirrel attack. See? The doggie defense works. Keep barking at ’em, Lucy.

I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time over the last couple of years thinking and writing about love and connection. I’ve come to understand that this lack of love and connection is at the root of a lot of human tragedy and unhappiness, including addictions and depression. As I talked with others and researched the psychology behind the issues, I ran into the surprising fact that researchers are increasingly using psychedelic drugs to allow volunteers to have experiences which are giving them a sense of connection which they’ve lost — something that allows them to feel connected to love and God in a way they didn’t understand before — which is having dramatic effects in combating things such as depression and addictions. In this 15-minute TED talk — without an audience in the age of COVID-19 — Johns Hopkins researcher Mary Cosimano shares her experiences with guided psilocybin sessions being used to treat addiction, depression and end-of-life issues. One of her key observations is the importance of love and connection. She said that it seems love is literally part of the answer. In her role as director of guide/facilitator services for the program, Cosimano is responsible for training and supervising session facilitators.

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