‘I understand all you’re saying, but what if I’ve waited too late?’

By David McElroy · July 6, 2021

What if you finally realize what you should have done years ago? Is it too late to change things?

I get a lot of email — quite a bit of it asking for advice — but this one seemed especially urgent. Lori read what I wrote last night about how we measure success. She said she couldn’t stop thinking about the last lines of that piece, in which I said, “But most people learn [about their misplaced values] too late to make any difference. I hope it’s not too late for me. And I hope it’s not too late for you.”

Lori is 42 years old — and she’s afraid it’s too late for her.

I’m sharing some of her words — lightly edited with her permission to protect her identity — because I have a feeling a lot of people are in the same position.

“I got married when I was 28, but it was pretty clear soon after that I made a serious mistake,” she wrote. “I wasn’t mature enough to know how shallow he was. I guess I was shallow at the time, too, but I kept growing and he didn’t, so I outgrew him. I chose my husband over another man (and I’m embarrassed about the reasons now) and I’ve been unhappy with my overgrown juvenile husband for years.”

She told me a lot more details and then ended with her real fear.

“I understand all you’re saying, but what if I’ve waited too late?”

Lori says she turned down a marriage proposal from another man — someone who really loved her — because he wasn’t ambitious enough. She said she knew he would never be wealthy and would never be a social-climber. The man she married cares a lot about money and appearances and social status.

So she married — and had a son with — a man who gave her all the things she thought she wanted when she was 28. She thought she had everything.

They had a house that was much bigger than they needed, because it was impressive. She had the best clothes and expensive jewelry. Everybody was envious of her. But she slowly understood that she was miserable — and she found herself painfully missing the love she had turned down.

She was married and had a son, though. Besides, the other man had moved on and married someone else. She tried not to think about it — but she couldn’t forget what it was like to have someone who loved her and valued her as a person.

About five years ago, the other man’s wife died. Weeks later, she messaged him on social media to express her condolences — and they ended up having serious discussions about what had happened between them. The man admitted that he had never gotten over her. She said that he had loved his wife, but he confessed that he would go to his grave loving Lori.

Those conversations were like deep confessions for her. Lori told the other man about how she had grown and changed — and about how she realized she had made mistakes in her choices. After a few weeks, they stopped talking, but everything about what had happened stayed in her mind.

Lori told me she never should have married her husband. She said she should have left him early in their marriage as she understood how emotionally abusive he could be. She said she should have left him when she realized what a toxic father he was to their son. And she said she now wishes she had left him when she found out the other man still loved her.

“At every stage, I knew what I should have done,” Lori wrote. “But I didn’t want to face the consequences. I didn’t want my family and friends to know I screwed up. I didn’t want to lose my financial and social position. So I did nothing.”

She said she finally understands what she needed to know 15 years ago when she was making her mistakes. She said her values have changed — and she values being loved and cherished and understood more than the things that used to matter to her.

Lori told me that the other man never had children. He wanted kids, but his wife was unable to have children. She said he told her five years ago that he still wants children.

“So what if I divorced my abusive husband and called [the other guy] and said, ‘I’m finally available!’” she asked. “And what if he says, ‘I’m sorry, but it’s too late for us, because I want someone who can have kids with me.’”

And she’s scared of ending up with nothing.

“What if I finally do what I should have done 15 years ago, but he doesn’t even want me anymore?” she said.

Lori is scared. She’s afraid of staying where she is. She’s afraid she doesn’t have a future if she tries to return to the past. And she’s afraid she can’t have the children the other man wanted.

“So you see why I’m scared to even try,” she wrote. “What if it’s too late? What if I finally ‘get’ all this stuff I should have understood back then, but I just waited too long for it to matter?”

I don’t know for sure what Lori should do. (You know from reading me in the past, though, that my inclination is to take a chance on love.) But I could answer her question about it being too late.

The best time for Lori to have made the right decision — if it really was the right decision — was 15 years ago. Maybe there were another five or six points along the way when it would have been the second best time and the third best time and so forth.

But all of those times have passed. None of them matter now. If being with someone else was the right thing in the past and remains the right thing now, the next best time to make the decision is now.

Lori also asked if wasting the previous 15 years meant she didn’t have enough time to make it worth being with someone else.

She’s concerned about being 42, as though everything would have been different if she had made the right decision 15 years before — when she was still young.

I reminded Lori that she can’t do anything about the years she’s already lived. If she were to marry the other man — assuming he still wanted her — she will be 52 in 10 years. But I reminded her that she’s going to be 52 in 10 years anyway. Whether she’s with someone who loves her — or with someone who doesn’t love her — the same time is going to pass either way.

And if you really want something, the sooner you make a decision — and make the change if it’s really right for you — the more time you can have with what you should’ve had all along.

Is it too late for Lori? Should she make this huge change in her life? I can’t say for sure. All I can say for sure is that if she’s sure this is what she is right for her, the best time for pursing it is today. Not tomorrow or next week or next year. Right now. Tonight.

If you’ve wasted a good chunk of your life with something that was completely wrong for you, nothing can change until you admit your mistake and start making changes. And the right time to do the right thing — if you’re sure it’s right — is always today.

Share on Social Networks

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?

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.

Related Posts