Sometimes we don’t really notice perfect match ’til it’s far too late

By David McElroy · May 9, 2019

I got a love letter of sorts tonight.

It was really just a Facebook message from a married woman who’s a friend, but it’s not what it sounds like. She wasn’t suggesting a secret tryst or anything of that sort. Instead, she was just lamenting that she didn’t pay more attention to me before she got married — to the wrong man.

I met Amanda online at least 15 years ago. We met in person a couple of times, but there was no real spark between us, so we never dated. We eventually became Facebook friends and I’ve watched as she moved through life — with career success and then marriage. She hadn’t reached out to me for many years.

But it turns out that she’s been watching me, even though I didn’t know it. And even though she has no intention of leaving her husband — and he doesn’t know she’s unhappy — she wanted me to know that she wishes she had noticed more about me before it was too late.

With her permission, I’m sharing her message here. There is no way that anybody would ever connect the two of us, so she’s not concerned that anybody might know she wrote this.

“I don’t mind if you share it,” she said when I asked her. “If it could help someone avoid what I’ve done to myself, it would be worth something to some girl.”

With very light editing for length and style — as well as to hide a few things about her identity — here is her message:

I’ve been debating for weeks whether to tell you this, but I decided it doesn’t really matter, so I might as well. Nobody really knows this, but I’ve been unhappy with my marriage from the beginning. My husband is a sweet guy and he has no idea how unhappy I am, so he doesn’t know I think we were a mistake. He hasn’t done anything wrong and I don’t plan to leave him, cause it would destroy him.

I knew since shortly after we married [eight years ago] that I wanted something different from what I chose, but I didn’t know what. In the last year, I’ve been noticing you in a different way than before and I realize someone like you is what I needed. You’re smart, funny, kind, introspective and caring in ways I didn’t know mattered until now. I knew you since even before I met [my husband], but I was young enough that my priorities were different. If I had known then what I know now, I would have come after you.

I don’t know if you would have been interested in me, but I see now that you have the qualities that matter to me. I guess I was too immature to understand my needs or who you are. I married someone all my friends love and my parents adore, but he doesn’t know the real me any better than he knows [my pet dog]. That makes me sad since he doesn’t seem interested in changing that.

Like I said, I’m not leaving [my husband] so don’t take this wrong. I just wanted to tell you how much I wish I had noticed what you really are and how different that is back when it might have made a difference. Whoever marries you is going to get a wonderful partner and father for her children. (I love how much you seem to get along with kids.) I hope you don’t mind me letting you know.

I have no idea whether Amanda and I might have been good as a couple. That’s not what I’m interested in right now.

I’m just fascinated by the realization that we often don’t know what we want or need when we’re young — and by the time we gain enough maturity to know better, it’s often too late.

I don’t know if it’s possible to live our lives any differently. I don’t know whether we can find maturity before we make our mistakes. In fact, I wonder whether it’s only through our mistakes that we gain the maturity to know what really matters.

The only thing I’m sure about is that the things which seem important before you marry the wrong person — or spend years in the wrong career or make a similarly difficult detour in life — seem very unimportant afterward.

When you finally figure out what matters in life, it might be too late.

Or maybe it’s never too late. The best time to do the right thing might have been 10 years ago, but the second best time might just be right now.

I appreciate Amanda for being vulnerable enough to share her thoughts tonight.

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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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