My own question now faced me: ‘Would a healthy person do that?’

By David McElroy · October 14, 2019

Katherine came to see me as soon as I got to dinner Monday night. She had told me bits and pieces in the past about an on-again, off-again relationship she’s had with a man, but I had never expressed an opinion about it — because she had never asked.

Tonight, she wanted advice.

Rick had seemed to be the man of her dreams. He was good looking, charming, attentive — and he seemed to be on his way to being successful. At first, their relationship had been great. They had started talking about a future together and it seemed as though her dreams were coming true. Then Rick suddenly backed off.

She didn’t know why. He didn’t break up with her. Not exactly. He just kept her at arm’s length and seemed more closed. He eventually pulled away more and more, going days without talking with her and making excuses not to see her. She felt that she was being discarded, very slowly.

But when another guy started pursuing her — and Katherine talked to Rick about breaking up — Rick professed love and pursued her again.

The story gets complicated, but the couple have gone through several rounds of this cycle. Rick will act as though he wants her. Katherine will believe things are finally going to work. But then Rick makes up one excuse after another to pull away. And when he believes she’s about to move on, he pursues again — just enough to keep her from leaving him.

Katherine desperately loves Rick. She’s convinced that he loves her, too, despite his unwillingness to commit to her, despite his unwillingness to keep the promises he makes when he’s wooing her.

She told me that she’s been willing to put up with the horrible times because she loves him so much — and because she’s been convinced that he will commit to her at last.

I knew my answer right up front, but I preferred to gently lead Katherine to the conclusion on her own. So I started asking her a series of questions.

I asked her to talk to my about what a loving relationship is like. I asked her to talk to me about how a man would treat her if he really loved her in a healthy way. And then I got her to characterize Rick’s actions when he pulled away from her. I asked her why someone who loved her would push her away and then refuse to let her go when she tried to separate herself to find someone new.

This last point really hit her hard. If he didn’t want her — and refused to commit to her — why did he keep doing just enough to keep her from finding what she needs somewhere else? Why didn’t he tell her that he wasn’t going to marry her?

“Would an emotionally healthy person do that?” I asked gently.

All of a sudden, Katherine understood something which she had been overlooking. She looked shocked and started saying she couldn’t believe how stupid she had been.

For all this time, Katherine had thought the big question was whether Rick loved her or not. Since she believed that he really did love her, she couldn’t believe that he would keep her dangling on a string unless he planned to eventually commit. Surely, he was going to marry her. But she now realized she had been asking the wrong question.

The question wasn’t whether Rick loved her or not. Of course he loved her, at least as much as he was able to. But he wasn’t emotionally healthy enough to have a loving, intimate relationship with anybody. He loved Katherine and wanted her until she got too close — and then he ran away.

The truth which Katherine discovered on her own while we talked is that it didn’t matter how much he loved her, because he wasn’t healthy enough to commit to her. He wanted her, but he was unconsciously scared of the love and intimacy he craved. And he wasn’t mature enough — or healthy enough — to do what he needed to do to get himself healthy, much less to do what was best for Katherine.

This was a shock to Katherine. It was devastating and it was a relief at the same time. She’s not sure whether she’s strong enough to walk away from him, but she now suspects she needs to — because she fears he’s going to get healthy. He’s too scared of his feelings to do that.

I was feeling pretty good about how the conversation had gone. I had helped to lead Katherine to a bitter truth which she needed to understand. She was grateful for the insight, but she was still grasping for a way to hold onto her love for Rick.

Then she asked me something I didn’t expect. She turned the subject to me.

“Have you ever done anything like this?” she asked.

And suddenly, I was faced with applying my own questions and my own reasoning and my own conclusions to my own life. I didn’t like the implications, but I needed to be honest with her.

“Well, this is a little complicated,” I said. “Let me figure out how to start the story.”

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

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?

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