For me, Valentine’s Day seems to bring out my regrets every year

By David McElroy · February 13, 2022

When I was in elementary school, everybody in a class exchanged Valentine’s Day cards at school. Is it still that way? We each decorated a shoebox with our name on it. We cut a slit in the top for others to drop cards through. The displays were up for several days — and everybody was required to give a card to everybody else.

When I was in the fifth grade, I had a crush on a beautiful blue-eyed blonde girl named Wendy. She was my ideal girl when I was about 11 years old. I was terrified of anybody realizing this, though, because then she might know — and that seemed scary. I guess it was “puppy love” rejection I feared.

Since classes routinely gave cards to everyone, there were large packs of small, cheap cards that stores sold. I bought a pack of those generic cards — but I also bought one very special card, much nicer than the others, just for Wendy.

Surely, I thought, nobody will notice. Nobody will figure it out. My secret would be safe.

But little girls who compared the cards they received in our class did notice. And they talked among themselves. Before I knew it, everybody was whispering that I “liked Wendy.”

A couple of days later, I was alone outside of Golden Springs Elementary School. The school day was over, but I was still there. Almost everybody else was gone. But then I noticed Wendy walking toward me. She was still here — and now I had to talk to her.

“David,” she started very shyly, “do you like me?”

I was filled with panic. If I admitted the truth, she might very well tell me that she didn’t “like” me. She might tell me she had her eyes on some other boy. I didn’t know what might happen, but I feared the worst.

I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I lied. I denied everything. I said as little as I possibly could — and then I took off quickly. I was escaping my possible rejection. But as I left, I looked at Wendy’s face. She looked stricken. And she looked hurt. All I cared about was running away, but I saw that my denial hurt her young heart.

She made several more very obvious attempts to be friendly with me before we moved away, but I always found a reason to run. Other kids in our class continued to tease me about “liking” Wendy and I continued to deny it.

For several years after that Valentine’s Day, I felt regret about what had happened. After I got far enough away from my fears to see what had really happened, I realized that Wendy wasn’t coming to torture me with rejection. She was probably flattered. Maybe she “liked” me in return.

That regret stayed with me for years, because if there’s one thing I do exceptionally well, it’s to obstinately remain devoted to loves which have left me behind. Wendy was my first real regret when it came to love, even though we were only 11 years old.

The regrets I carry with me today are far more recent. They’re far more adult in nature. But my regrets about love all seem to be informed by the same fear of rejection which caused me to act like a little fool in the fifth grade.

My strongest regret about love today is a decision I made about how to handle something with a woman more than a decade ago. How long? I don’t recall exactly. Was it 12 years ago? 13?

I tell myself today that if I had handled that situation differently, my life would be totally different today. I tell myself that I would be happier. I imagine that I would have love and a family now if I’d handled things differently.

I know this regret is ridiculous. I’m well aware of the fact that if I’d made a different decision, I might have found a different sort of misery instead. The path we didn’t take — for each regret — could be far worse than the delight we imagine we would have found. We can never know for sure.

I know all that, but I still feel regret. I still put myself back into a specific moment and say, “What if I had simply…?”

Young Wendy was my first experience with botching love, but it wouldn’t be my last. As I sit here thinking about all the ways that I’ve managed to lose the love that some women would have liked to give me, I’m still naive and foolish enough to believe I’ll get one more chance at it.

And I’m still crazy enough to believe the time is coming — very soon — when I’ll finally get it right. And then maybe all my regrets about love can be left in the past.

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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.

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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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