Those we love change who we are and reflect who we’re becoming

By David McElroy · July 4, 2020

I can’t possibly tell you why I fell in love with Gail when we were freshmen in college.

That’s not a negative reflection on her. To the contrary, I have only good things to say about her. But I’ve changed so much since I fell in love with her that I can’t put myself into that emotional place. I’m still the same person I was then, but I barely understood myself, much less how two adults should love each other.

I was emotionally and psychologically immature.

Gail was my reflection of the ideal woman at the time. We had gone to high school together. We had spent time in church together after her widowed mother married someone in my church. She was bright, well-spoken, confident, creative, ambitious and attractive. I considered myself very fortunate.

I’ve been thinking lately about what our choice of romantic partners says about us — and I can’t help but think that our partner choices change over the years in ways that reflect who we are becoming and the ways that we allow those people to influence us.

When we move on to other partners, it’s often simply because we are no longer the same people we were when we chose that person — for good or for bad.

Gail and I dated for three years. In the last year of the relationship, I knew something wasn’t right. I knew I was ready to move on. I knew that I was becoming someone who no longer matched her. But I was terrified to give up what I had. What if it was the wrong choice to move on?

Looking back on that, breaking up was the obvious right choice. She was the ideal woman for the man I thought I was at the time, but I was rapidly growing and becoming someone with much different understandings of the world. Maybe the same was true of her. I have a strong feeling that marrying her would have been a serious mistake.

I suspect most people choose a marriage partner far before they’re really ready. How many of us are still the same people — with the same understandings of life, ourselves and the world — that we had in our 20s? Or even early 30s?

If I had married Gail when we were in our early 20s — as we planned at one time — we both would have been stuck with somebody who reflected what we had been at the time. And even though I have nothing but good things to say about her, I know that we were already moving in radically different directions. We would have been terrible choices for one another — even though we were a great match at 19 or 20.

If I look at the women I’ve fallen in love with over the years, they’re all very different people. Each one reflects the growth I had experienced up until that point and each one changed me with one influence or another. One of the biggest surprises of my life is that my life choices are always shaped — sometimes in subtle ways — by the expectations that women have of me, because I want to make each one happy.

We sometimes choose partners and then find — just a few years later — that we don’t match who those people are. We often wonder how we got stuck with such a person. I suspect that for many of us, the answer is simple. We were less-mature people in the past. Our expectations were different. We weren’t as aware of what we were committing ourselves to. Our values might have been different.

Then as we change — and the other person doesn’t change in the same ways — we end up miserable. That person is slowing us down, possibly dragging us down from becoming what we see as the best person we know we could be.

I realize that I wouldn’t have fallen in love with the sort of woman I love today when I was in my 20s or 30s. That doesn’t mean that I was “the wrong person” back then. It doesn’t mean that such a person was defective at the time. It just means we wouldn’t have matched in our expectations, maturity, values and desires.

I’ve realized recently that I define periods of my life by who I loved during a certain period. Some people divide their lives by careers or where they lived or something similar. For me, it’s all about who I love or loved. Everything else is secondary, because my desires and expectations revolve around my love for a particular person.

For those who would like to have one partner for life, this isn’t good news, because it goes against everything our system — including our culture, religion, expectations — has set up for us. I’m sure there are a few people who match well at an early point in life and remain well-matched for the rest of life. For most of us, it simply doesn’t work this way.

I would be horribly unhappy today with the sort of woman I would have chosen when I was 30. And that sort of woman would be horribly unhappy with what I am today, too.

I haven’t spoken to Gail in a very long time, but my understanding is that she has had a very happy life with a husband and children who were perfect for her. In retrospect, I’m so happy that I didn’t hold her back from becoming who she needed to be — and I’m thankful that I wasn’t deterred from the huge changes I’ve needed to go through to become what I am today.

As I enter the period that I believe will be the most productive and creative of my life, I know the sort of woman I need. I only hope that whoever I need will have done the growing and changing that she needs — enough for her to need what I offer — by the time we’re finally ready for each other.

Love is horribly difficult — and it’s far more complicated by the fact that some of us change in ways that would have once seemed unrecognizable to us.

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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.

Narcissists tend to turn their children into narcissists — and since a narcissist doesn’t realize he or she is a narcissist, there’s no bad intent. How does this happen? I watched a YouTube video over the weekend from an Australian psychologist who does a nice job of summarizing how it works. None of this is new to me, but I thought it was useful for those who haven’t spent years digging through books and articles about it. The same psychologist has an excellent summary of something which confuses a lot of people about narcissism. You’ve all seen examples of the loud, boisterous and overbearing narcissist, but what about the ones who are more introverted and vulnerable? This type is called a covert narcissist (or a vulnerable narcissist), and this is what my father was. In the first video, I strongly see myself in the ways my father treated me and in the second video, I see what my father was almost successful in making me become.

It’s National Dog Day in the U.S. and Lucy is here to remind you to go express love and appreciation to your favorite canine. Not only does your doggie friend give you love and affection, but he or she also protects your home from intruders — such as birds, squirrels, mail carriers and other undesirables who deserve to be barked at vigorously. Where would we be without that? And if you think this service is actually unnecessary, ask yourself how long it’s been since your home was the victim of a vicious squirrel attack. See? The doggie defense works. Keep barking at ’em, Lucy.

I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time over the last couple of years thinking and writing about love and connection. I’ve come to understand that this lack of love and connection is at the root of a lot of human tragedy and unhappiness, including addictions and depression. As I talked with others and researched the psychology behind the issues, I ran into the surprising fact that researchers are increasingly using psychedelic drugs to allow volunteers to have experiences which are giving them a sense of connection which they’ve lost — something that allows them to feel connected to love and God in a way they didn’t understand before — which is having dramatic effects in combating things such as depression and addictions. In this 15-minute TED talk — without an audience in the age of COVID-19 — Johns Hopkins researcher Mary Cosimano shares her experiences with guided psilocybin sessions being used to treat addiction, depression and end-of-life issues. One of her key observations is the importance of love and connection. She said that it seems love is literally part of the answer. In her role as director of guide/facilitator services for the program, Cosimano is responsible for training and supervising session facilitators.

It’s something I wrote four and a half years ago — in the desperation of loneliness — and it’s become my most popular article. It’s not my best writing. It’s raw and unpolished. But it seems as though a lot of people can identify with it. It’s called Missing someone creates intense physical sensations in my heart. Just to give you an idea how many people still read it, I had 11,586 people visit the page last month — from 2,907 cities and towns around the world. London sent the most readers for it, followed by New York, Westminster, Los Angeles, Chicago, Kuala Lumpur, Melbourne, Sydney, Toronto and almost 3,000 more. I’ve noticed something interesting. It always gets the most hits from an area of the world in the late hours, right after midnight, and that breaks my heart — because I understand why. All these people are so lonely and are missing someone so much that they turn to a search engine looking for answers, so they stumble upon this piece. I wrote this late at night on the day after Christmas because my heart was breaking. I needed to express how much I missed someone, and a lot of people seem to identify with it. If you’re one of those people, I have no way of knowing who you are, but I empathize with you. I know why you hurt. I wish I could do more to help. I hurt with you, because after all this time, I still feel the same way.

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