What’s the use of love if the one who you love doesn’t need you?

By David McElroy · September 5, 2020

Maybe I’ve always wanted to be needed. I’m not sure. I just know I wasn’t aware of it until the last few years.

For the past two days, I’ve been stuck on this idea of being needed. Almost three years ago, I wrote about how the best relationships are centered around mutual need and “mutual rescue.”

But this thing that’s been nagging at me is different. It left me feeling down, because it emphasized how much I miss being needed. Feeling that made it hard to make it through work Friday, because I was feeling lost — as though I no longer had any direction or motivation.

On the way home Friday evening, I snapped this photo of myself in the car. I had spent the day pretending to care what others had to say — talking to them about the expensive house we were looking at — and I knew that my fake smile had been pasted on too long.

As I drove home, I realized how little I cared about any of it. None of it mattered to me. What was the point without feeling needed by a family who I loved?

My ideas about what I needed changed radically between the ages of 25 and 40. They’ve changed even more since then. At this point, the person I was in my 20s or 30s seems quite foreign to me. The things I cared about lost value to me. The things I care about deeply today are things I wouldn’t have valued then.

I was more focused on external things back then. By my current understanding of the world, I was shallow and simplistic. I’ve talked lately about some of the ways I’ve changed, so I’m not going to repeat that. But this realization was something different.

Without realizing it, I think I’ve always assumed that other people see their own potential — what they can be at their best and happiest — and they really want whatever will help them become that. With romantic relationships that were serious or at least could have been, I unconsciously assumed that each woman saw in me something that could help her become what she needed to be.

I made this unconscious assumption because that’s the way I think. I have no interest in a woman who doesn’t embody some qualities that I need in my own life. I’m not interested in a woman who can’t bring strengths to a relationship that I don’t have. Every time I’ve fallen hopelessly for a woman — which hasn’t happened often — it’s been because I was in love with someone who was my complementary match.

I’ve always fallen in love with women who had strengths I didn’t have. But I’ve always seen myself as being able to bring something to her that transformed her, too — something that completely changed her life for the better.

But something has occurred to me over the last two days. What if I love someone who doesn’t believe she needs me? What if I see this complementary relationship of transformation with someone who doesn’t think I offer something that she absolutely must have in her life?

What if she doesn’t see what she really could be — and has no idea the role I could play in helping her to become that?

That was the most depressing thought I’ve had for years, because my simple realization was that someone like that — someone who might think I was interesting or clever or kind, but who didn’t see something more than that — was never going to choose me.

I realized that she would never conclude that I offered anything valuable enough to make it worth accepting me into her life.

When I was young, I wanted to offer wealth and success. I’ve talked over and over about why those things lost their appeal to me. My focus is on things that I consider infinitely more important. But what if I love someone who doesn’t ultimately share those values? What that would mean is that she might consider me interesting. She might consider that I would be a good partner. But she wouldn’t understand the degree to which I would change her life for the better.

And if that were true, nothing else would matter. She wouldn’t ever choose me, so loving her would be pointless.

There’s no sense in taking on a partner just because someone might be interesting or attractive or any of those sorts of things. Those are the sorts of shallow reasons that would cause young kids to date or to develop immature relationships. But there’s no sense in taking a real partner unless it’s a relationship that you absolutely have to have in your life.

This realization has left me depressed, to be honest. It’s left me feeling as though someone who I loved didn’t see my importance to changing her life in the same way that I saw her as important to changing mine. And there’s no use in loving such a person.

For now, I feel as though I’m going around in life with a pasted-on smile in order to hide what I really think and what I really feel. At work, I’m pretending to care about things which I couldn’t care less about. And it’s all wearing thin. I can’t keep up the charade.

For a long time now, I’ve felt that I was treading water in life. Just waiting. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but it seemed as though something good would finally happen — and I would be loved by someone — if I just kept waiting.

But that all seems to have blown up in my mind — because I’ve realized that a woman will never choose me if she doesn’t understand why she needs me. She might like me loving her, but until she decides she needs me, too — that she must have me — nothing will change.

Since that change doesn’t seem likely, something else has to change in my life. I have to convince myself to give up on what I’ve believed I needed. And that’s really difficult.

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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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