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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When I first discovered the idea of unschooling, it was so radical that I had trouble finding people who even knew what it was. Today, the idea is mainstream enough that major media outlets sometimes cover the topic in a favorable way. The Sunday newspaper supplement called Parade had a strongly favorable article about unschooling a couple of weeks ago which explained what it is and how it’s different from homeschooling. It’s less structured. There’s no curriculum. There’s plenty of flexibility. And there are no tests and grades. (Most people today are shocked to learn that testing and grading didn’t exist in schools through history until the last couple hundred years.) If you want your children to think for themselves instead of following the herd mentality that pervades every school I’ve been part of, you owe it to yourself — and to your kids — to consider taking control of your children’s development back from governments. Just because you and I survived institutional schools doesn’t mean it’s the wisest choice. Start by reading the Parade article. It might open your eyes.

In the Birmingham suburb of Hueytown, the Golden Gophers of Hueytown High School had just defeated the Eufala Tigers in the second round of the state playoffs Friday night. It’s not a game that will mean a lot to anybody outside those two communities, but it meant everything to the players and coaches involved. After the game, Hueytown defensive coordinator Trent Campbell was celebrating with his victorious players when he noticed Eufala offensive lineman Dallas Ingram distraught and alone. Campbell left his players to console the distraught Ingram and photographer Dennis Victory caught photos of the pair together. “My reaction was to go see about him, because I’ll see my guys on Sunday and next week and the rest of their high school careers, but that’s a young man we watched on film for a week and studied and he’s a fantastic player,” Campbell said later. “And it wasn’t too long ago when I played my last high school football game and I know what that feeling is and you sort of never forget that. I went to tell him what a great player I thought he was and what a great game I thought they played and I wish nobody had to lose that night because it was an incredible game.” This is what sports at the high school level should be about. Winning is great and winning is fun. But humanity and decency last longer.

I have changed radically about some things over the years, but probably none of those changes have been as great as the ways that I feel about people who are viewed as evil or criminal. When I was young, I was eager to see criminals or foreign political enemies killed. Today, I don’t view such people though rose-colored glasses and I don’t view them as blameless folks who are going to turn their lives around if we just think happy thoughts. But I can’t celebrate the death of anybody, even if he might deserve it in some ways of thinking about it. Even if it’s sometimes necessary to kill someone — and those cases are often debatable — I regret the death of someone who will now never have a chance to discover love and change his life. There are some evil people in this world, but I can’t celebrate their deaths.

There was a time when I was idealistic enough to believe that if a writer expressed his thoughts clearly and simply enough, any bright and honest person would understand his point. I know better now. We all bring so many unconscious assumptions to the things we read that we often see what we expect to see instead of what the writer intended. This is incredibly frustrating to me as a writer, but I’m trying more and more to just say what I need to say — as clearly as I know how — and then ignore the inevitable responses which show that others perceived something which was not intended. I have to write for those who “get” where I’m coming from, not for those who see my words through personal filters that change my meaning. I hope my intentions are clear to you and I hope what I write can be useful to you, but if not, maybe my work just isn’t right for you. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

I found out this evening that someone I casually knew killed himself last Wednesday. I didn’t know him well — and I never found him personable — but he had started work a couple of months ago at a restaurant where I go. He was a 26-year-old who struck me as a confused and unhappy person, but I didn’t think much about it since he stayed to himself and resisted my efforts to chat with him. It turns out that he had a history of depression and had a lot of gender confusion. He seemed very androgynous to me and I learned today that he presented himself as female in some situations. He was rejected by a romantic interest last week, so he went to the woods and killed himself. His body wasn’t found for three days. It’s tragic how miserable people around us can be and how we so rarely know the truth about things they struggle with.

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