Life’s path can change direction when you’re ready for real love

By David McElroy · May 23, 2019

I didn’t recognize Walter when I saw him at a gas station last week. That’s understandable since I hadn’t seen him for 15 years, but there was something else — something more basic.

When I knew Walter, he was addicted to pills and alcohol. He lived down the street from me. He was unhappily married and had turned to substances to numb his pain. By the time his wife left him and they lost their home, he looked like a bum most of the time. I never knew what became of him.

The man who called out my name at the gas station looked nothing like a bum. There was something familiar about his eyes, but my memory couldn’t place him. I had to ask who he was.

After he told me, I smiled and shook his hand. He was sitting in a Mercedes looking like a business executive, not like a bum or an addict. We chatted for a couple of moments as I stood there, but I couldn’t ask the real question on my mind. He knew what I must be wondering, though.

“I guess I look a little different than the last time you saw me, huh?” he said with a smile.

I admitted that life seemed to be better for him now than when I last knew him. He told me a little bit about what he’s been doing and about his new family — a wife and two young children. He talked briefly about the business he owns. And he said something simple which I haven’t been able to quit thinking about.

“This might sound like a cliche, but I had to change to be worthy of Rachel’s love,” he said. “She fell in love with me and I knew I wouldn’t keep a woman like her if I didn’t get my act together fast. I had to become a better person to be worthy of what she was willing to give me.”

He told me that he quit drinking and hadn’t touched any addictive pills since the woman who is now his wife came along. He said that when he had gone through several recovery programs — including a hardcore “tough love” program run by fundamentalist Christians — people kept telling him he needed to get himself straight in order to attract the love he craved.

“It worked the other way around for me,” he said. “I was still a pathetic man when Rachel met me, but she saw something in me and gave me a chance to prove myself. Her faith in me changed everything. I needed her and I knew I would lose her unless I changed. She loved me first and I instantly changed. I didn’t think that was even possible.”

We exchanged a few more pleasantries and then Walter was gone. I’ve been thinking about that conversation ever since.

Years ago, when I saw the movie “As Good As It Gets,” I missed the emotional point of the film. It just went right past me. But I saw it again about 10 or 15 years ago and it suddenly made so much sense to me. I guess my life had changed enough to I was ready to hear what it had to say.

Jack Nicholson plays a successful writer, Melvin, who has some psychological issues. Although he writes romance novels, he’s a personal wreck. He’s obsessive-compulsive and nasty to the people around him. He’s socially awkward and selfish. He’s not someone anybody would want to be around.

Helen Hunt plays a single mom named Carol. She’s a server at the restaurant where Melvin goes every day. Through a series of events, their lives become entwined and he sees something in her that makes him want to change. He has been scared of trying to heal his psychiatric issues, but he realizes that fixing himself is the only way he might have a chance with Carol.

In a scene which is heart-rending and sweet, Melvin finally confesses to Carol that her presence in his life has motivated him to try to fix himself. In this famous scene — one which I absolutely didn’t understand when I first watched it — Melvin tells Carol, “You make me want to be a better man.”

In a perfect world, we would reform ourselves simply because we wanted to be our very best. Just for ourselves.

All of the smart people tell us that we shouldn’t change for someone else. They tell us that we should change just because we want to be the best we can be. That sounds nice, but I find that real life doesn’t work that way.

We tend to change — if we’re going to change at all — because we want to be worthy of the love we crave from some specific person. We can know what we need to do. We can know what we need to be. We can see our potential. We can read all the motivational books. But until the right incentive is there, real change is hard to come by for most of us.

Everybody needs someone to believe in him. Everybody needs someone whose love he wants. Everybody needs someone who he wants enough to become his best self for.

Love is like salve that can heal broken lives. If there’s little or no love in a relationship, there’s no change that results from it. But if there’s great love and great emotional desire, powerful healing becomes natural. The right kind of love can provide us enough incentive to be nudged just a little to one side or the other. And that can take us to entirely different places.

Walter changed when he wanted to be worthy of a powerful love which he found and craved. I understand that.

I know how much more I can do and be with my life. I wish I could simply live up to my potential because I was self-motivated. That would be ideal. But I don’t live in an ideal world.

I live in a world where I want to do good things for a woman. I have a need to bring my creations and my achievements to her and to say, “I made this for you.”

Powerful love can make change possible for people who want to change themselves anyway.

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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.

I’ve been with people for most of this day, but I feel lonely tonight. I’ve had things on my mind for the last few days that I feel the strong need to talk about. I need someone to share my thoughts with — someone who’s interested in ideas and how they affect us. Someone who gets excited to discover new things and can find joy in seeing new ways those things might change our lives. I feel lonely tonight because I painfully remember what it feels like to have that — and I’m craving that sort of connection. I miss having someone I can call and say, “I’ve been reading something and it’s sparked some thoughts I want to share with you.” Those sorts of conversations have lasted for hours for me in the past — or for thousands of words if it’s an exchange of mail — and it feels wrong that there is nobody who wants to hear such things from me tonight. I used to think being lonely was about being alone, but I understand now it’s a longing for one particular person. The loneliest place to be when you need one person is in a crowd composed of people who cannot be who you need.

I don’t agree with everything the late Neil Postman wrote, but I would argue that no other recent scholar gives coherent structure to the last few hundred years in the way his books do. I’m currently re-reading his book, “Technopoly,” and I’m comforted to have a scholar give structure and definitions to things which I’ve observed and barely understood. I was enough of a technophile when I first read this book that I bristled at much of what it said. I didn’t want him to be right and it was easier to dismiss him as a Luddite. But as I see technology continue to enable an information glut which is changing society for the worse, I find comfort in his explanations for how we got here. I don’t yet know the solutions, but I finally understand the problems more clearly. I suspect that much of what we need to make life more meaningful can be found in things we accidentally threw away in the past to make room for technologies. I strongly urge you to read the book and think about its implications.

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