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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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Fear of terrifying future makes heart look to the past for clarity

By David McElroy · April 18, 2020

What if the one who got away came back?

Most of us have a love who got away — someone who our feelings turn to in secret moments — someone we still love, who will forever make us quietly ask, “What if…?”

At first, I thought it was just me. Over the last six or eight weeks, I can’t stop my heart from reviewing the past. I can’t stop some internal mechanism from reviewing every old love and giving me revised conclusions.

It’s as though my heart has a brain of its own. It takes all the inputs from the past and then adds the changes going on in the world and renders an updated conclusion about different loves from the past.

Then I realized it isn’t just me. People I know personally are talking with me about making changes to their relationships — ditching something that doesn’t work or reaching out to someone they wish had turned out differently — in ways they wouldn’t have imagined a few months ago.

For some, it’s a time to fix things which have gone wrong or a time to escape relationships which have died or to reach out in vulnerability to love which was lost.

So it’s not just me, but it’s also not just the people I know. There’s something broader going on. I’ve seen several articles about people wanting to rekindle or heal old relationships, some romantic and some friendships — such as this piece.

I’ve even read articles speculating about why some people are apparently more sexually needy right now, which I attribute to a broader need for real emotional intimacy but our sex-crazed society has trouble interpreting.

Every time a relationship door is closed, there’s a reason. That reason might not be honestly acknowledged by both parties, but there’s always a reason. And there are times when rekindling an old flame just gives you a chance to get burned again. So some relationships are best left in the past. But can you trust your heart to know the difference about which is worth pursuing again and which should be left alone?

In the last week, I’ve had brief emails from two women who I once dated. Both were short and neither message betrayed an indication of any other motive. One of them just said, “I just needed to reach out to you and see if you’re OK. I’ve missed you.” The other one had a similar message in different words.

My heart and my brain were in agreement about both of these. There was nothing to save and nothing worth resurrecting. I would have once been overjoyed to hear from one of them again, but I now saw it only as an emotional risk not worth the trouble. The other is someone who is sweet and who I wish well, but I haven’t really wanted to see since the day I broke up with her.

Why did they reach out to me?

In both cases, things didn’t end especially well between us. Maybe the recent change in society left each of them wanting closure for something that never had a proper ending. Or maybe something in one or both of them still sees me as “the one who got away.”

Oddly, I’m not interested in knowing why, because neither of them is right for me at this stage of my life, so even if a simple contact represented more — which it might or might not — there’s nothing to pursue.

When I’ve talked with others or read these stories about recent experiences of strangers, I find myself feeling as though people are reaching out to do what they wish they had already done — maybe even what they knew before this that they should have done.

In other words, it doesn’t seem as though the recent crisis has changed the way people felt. It seems as though people’s fear about the future — or fear of being so emotionally alone — has given people courage to do what they had wanted to do before.

I haven’t made any secret of the fact that the crisis we’ve been going through has strengthened the longings I’ve already had for companionship and love and understanding. (I’ve written about it here and here.) But as I look at my real feelings, I find that nothing has really changed for me.

I have a love who got away.

Unlike some of the other people I’ve talked with, though, it’s not something I can reach out and attempt to change. I did everything in my power to share a future with someone — a future she claimed she wanted — but she made different choices. There was nothing I could do about it. She never even explained, and that hurt very deeply.

Unless someone else comes along, I suppose I’m doomed to die with strongly mixed feelings for her — love, mistrust and resentment. I don’t trust her at this point, of course, because I was burned once by trusting her love and her words — and that gives me a lot of angry resentment in the short term.

I’ll always know vividly, though, that an emotionally mature version of both of us could have been a once-in-a-lifetime partnership. My vision of that seems to be stubbornly consistent through the resentment and mistrust.

So my heart does its elaborate calculations — the good and the bad — and the little paper tape spits out the revised answer.

More than ever, I know she would have been an excellent partner — with the right amount of difficult emotional work together. I actually suspect she would make an excellent “crisis partner” after she readjusted herself to the new reality we face. It would have taken a lot of emotional work — because she is apparently oblivious to many of her own feelings — but it’s work I would have welcomed.

I am envious of those who know who they wish they could choose to return to, because they have the freedom to change things if they want to. If I had been the one who had said no to a relationship which I now know I must have, I would gladly swallow my pride and reach out to change things — just like the dramatic conclusion to a Hollywood romance. But I’m not in such a position.

I’m just someone who still longs for the love who got away.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

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.

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