Traits that lead to great romance don’t always make right partners

By David McElroy · May 6, 2021

I was surprised a couple of days ago to learn that Bill and Melinda Gates are divorcing. I don’t keep up with celebrity marriages and I’d never had any great interest in the Gates family. But I’d always had the impression they were a happy and stable family.

Marriages break up for all sorts of reasons and I have no idea what happened with the Gates family. But their announcement has had me thinking about why so many relationships that start like fairy tales end up like nightmares.

It seems to me that our desires often mislead us. When we’re looking for someone to date, we have a list of things we want — conscious or unconscious — but those aren’t necessarily things that will keep people together for good.

As I’ve gotten more mature — in life and in relationships — I’ve noticed that my own standards have unconsciously changed.

About 10 years ago, I casually dated a woman for about a year. Someone later asked me what I meant by saying we had dated “casually.” I wasn’t sure how to explain it at first. Then the truth dawned on me — and I understood something about myself.

When I had said — to myself and to others — that this woman and I were casually dating, what I really meant was that she wasn’t someone I would want to marry. I was never going to have a serious relationship with her — and that wasn’t what she wanted from me, either.

She was an impressive young woman. She was a beautiful blue-eyed blonde who was bright and accomplished. She was trying to start a new business while we dated. We had a good time together for about a year. She and I had both gotten out of serious relationships not long before that, so we each needed someone to spend time with and to trust.

But I wasn’t the guy she wanted for the long term and she wasn’t what I wanted for the long term. We never said that out loud, but I’m confident that she knew it as well as I did.

When I was younger, I saw everyone I dated (or wanted to date) as potentially the right partner. I had standards, of course, but I was more interested in short-term qualities than what a woman would be like as a partner — as a mother, as a wife, as a business partner, as a friend.

I was talking with a college student a few days ago about a new guy she is excited to have started dating. I happen to know the guy — and he’s not someone I’d recommend to a friend. He’s rude. He’s pompous. He appears to think only of himself. He speaks of other women in very disrespectful ways that make it clear what he’s interested in. By my standards, he’s a jerk.

I gently mentioned to this woman that I questioned whether he would be a good partner for her, but she wasn’t interested in my concerns.

This young woman likes the man’s tough image. She said it makes him “mysterious” and “exciting.” She loves it that he has a motorcycle and an expensive car. She likes it that he makes a lot of money already and will probably make a lot more with what he’s working toward. She said she could see herself married to the guy — and she said all her friends would be jealous of her.

I asked her whether she thought he would be a good friend to her, whether he would take care of her when she was sick, whether he would be a good father.

She looked at me blankly. Then she said something that explains the thought process of a lot of people in similar situations.

“I guess so,” she said. “But I’m just thinking about what it would be like to marry him — not have to spend the rest of my life with him.”

She’s thinking for the short term. I probably did the same thing when I was 21. (I almost married a woman when I was in college, for instance, who would have been a horrible long-term fit for me.) And I think what she’s doing is just one form of something that a lot of people do.

Many people have a set of short-term traits that attract them to a person. They start dating. One thing leads to another. At some point, it often leads to marriage.

Then it turns out they don’t really like each other. It turns out that he has no interest in taking care of her when she needs help (or maybe vice versa). It turns out they want different things. It turns out that he’s a terrible father. Or maybe she’s a terrible mother.

And then these people who had been so excited about one another when they married find they have absolutely nothing to keep them together. With many of them, there’s nothing between them anymore except contempt. And they’re often stuck for life with someone they don’t like — because they stay together for children who silently know there’s something wrong in their home.

I have no idea what happened in the Gates marriage. They’re both smart people who certainly gave a lot of thought to what they were doing before they married. But if they’re like many of the other bright people I know, they might have discovered that the exciting things that brought them together — and that made them happy in those wedding photos — weren’t the things they needed in a partner for life.

The things that attract us to a person aren’t necessarily what we really need in a long-term partner, but that’s hard to see when we have stars in our eyes.

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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?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

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