You finally have to stop making excuses for people who hurt you

By David McElroy · March 23, 2022

For more than seven years now, I’ve been living in a cage — but the cage always had an open door. I could fly away anytime I wanted.

But I didn’t want to leave the cage. I was waiting for a woman I loved. I was waiting for someone else to change. I lied to myself. I angrily told myself — at times — that I wasn’t waiting for her. But something in me believed — against all evidence — that she was going to be the love I needed. Any day now. And so I waited and waited, wasting years of my life.

I can admit that to myself now. What’s been harder to admit is that I’ve been making excuses for behavior that hurt me. I would have told anybody else that her behavior showed she didn’t care and wouldn’t care, not in the ways that her words had said she did.

But I needed to believe in her. I needed to believe in her love. So I made excuses for her.

She never asked me to make excuses for her. I did it because I didn’t want to give up on her. More than once, she encouraged me to wait for her, though. (“Don’t give up on me,” she asked several years into my wait.) But I’m the one who invented the excuses which allowed me to justify the complete mismatch between her words and her actions.

I met her many years ago, but nothing really happened between us at first. I was more interested than she was at the time, and then she eventually started dating someone else seriously. For years, we were just Facebook friends with no real connection. I kept up with her — and was sorry that I had never been able to get closer to her — but that changed about eight years ago.

She got in touch with me out of the blue. She had gotten a business inquiry at her job from someone with my name. She said she thought at first that it might be me, but then the man’s poor grammar made her realize it couldn’t be me. It was just a funny little incident. A coincidence.

But we kept talking. Over the weeks and then months, we got closer and closer. Eventually, we each confessed love. Before long, we were talking about our future together, not in a “what if” way, but in words of genuine expectation.

I still have all of her cards and emails. I know what she said. I know the things she promised. We talked about our future children’s names, what our house would look like, all sorts of things. I know how much she said she loved me.

Even then, there were things I made excuses for. On two occasions, I wrote her long emails sharing important things from my past — very emotional things for me — which I thought she should know. She didn’t respond to either one. Not in our conversations. Not in an email. She didn’t even acknowledge the very personal and important things I had shared with her.

When I finally brought it up with her, she said vaguely that she had trouble dealing with certain things. She couldn’t explain why. She just said it was the way she was. It never made sense to me, but I read all sorts of things between the lines of that. And then I expanded all of that over time as a way to make excuses for her behavior.

Something changed to put the brakes on her intense professions of love. I will never know what it was, because she wouldn’t talk to me about it. I invented reasons for her. I made excuses for her.

Then she promised that she needed a few months — maybe six months — to decide what she wanted, but six months came and went with no explanation. She made it clear that she didn’t want me to give up on her, but she never explained anything. She never said she had changed her mind about her feelings. There were occasional gifts and random communication, but that’s about all.

She never seemed to have any awareness — or concern — about how her behavior had affected me. She was completely aware of the state of my feelings for her and what the period of separation had done to me, but that wasn’t enough to cause her to be honest with me about her feelings or to disavow what she had once promised.

And for all that time, I invented excuses to explain why she was acting in this way. I took bits and pieces of her behavior and came up with psychological theories that would explain what was allowing this — and I hoped that something would happen to change everything.

I waited for a phone call that was never going to come.

Her behavior was inexplicable at best and selfish at worst, but I was the one who chose to wait. I was the one who chose to make excuses for her. I was the one who chose to hope that the day would come when she would call one day and say she was ready to go back to where we had been seven and a half years ago. I was the one who believed that we could find a way to get past everything — and to make it all make sense.

It was my choice. I was wrong. If I had been wiser, I would have been able to say, “You know what? An emotionally healthy person doesn’t act this way with someone she loves.” And I would have given up on her. But I wasn’t wise enough to do that.

At least not until about 10 days ago. Something happened. The details don’t matter. She had gotten in touch with me a few days before to tell me something which gave me concrete hope for the first time in years. Then she sent me an email to reverse that. She was completely within her rights to do what she did, but I’m not sure it even occurred to her how much her reversal was going to devastate me.

And something changed inside for me on that day. I had no more excuses for her. I had to admit that a woman who loved me could not have done all that she had done, no matter how many excuses I made. Suddenly, it was over.

Many people have a tendency after love is over to hate the other person and to see the worst about that person going forward. I can’t do that. I saw the good things about her very clearly and rationally. I didn’t imagine those good qualities. I knew exactly what she was capable of being at her best.

I was willing to overlook fatal flaws — which I believed she would overcome with growth — because the good parts of her were so powerfully good.

I won’t regret having loved her. I will always think highly of her, and I will always regret what could have been. I’m not angry with her. I’ll always wish the best for her in the life she’s chosen for herself. I hope she’ll be happy.

But what I won’t do anymore is to make excuses for her.

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I’m seeing a lot of simplistic and dishonest explanations right now for the current rioting in France. Those on the populist far right claim it’s all about Muslim immigrants to France disrupting the culture. Their message is that this sort of thing is going to happen in the U.S. unless “we defend the border.” On the far left, socialists and their fellow travelers claim the riots are all about wealthy people in France not paying enough taxes, resulting in cuts to government services. The truth is far more complicated, but it’s rooted in the decline of population growth in Europe. There simply aren’t enough young workers paying into the tax system anymore, so cuts in social services were inevitable. There is genuine cultural tension as more and more people immigrate from other countries, but government cuts to education and other services are even more important to what’s happening. The situation is complicated, so don’t let dishonest people with U.S. political agendas tell you that it happens to support whatever they were already promoting for partisan reasons.

Here’s another reason to appreciate the cats in your life: New research involving 93 countries found that places with more cats per person also tended to have happier people. The researchers say the finding fits with previous evidence that living with pets can reduce loneliness and stress while providing companionship, emotional attachment and social support. The study doesn’t prove that cats cause greater happiness, but it certainly adds to the evidence that sharing your home — and your life — with a cat might be good for you.

The company that owns Facebook and Instagram is heavily promoting its new AI-based software assistant called Muse, but people who are using it as it was designed are incredibly foolish. An early adopter of the software discovered that a few days ago when he advertised an item for sale on Facebook Marketplace — and he inadvertently gave Muse full authority to act on his behalf. The software agreed to a lowball offer made by another Facebook user and then gave that man the home address of the man for whom he was an agent. The software told the buyer that the seller was home and waiting for him. When the buyer showed up and waited angrily, the would-be buyer left an angry review for the man. And this angry man had the seller’s home address. It was only well after that that the software reported what it had done and admitted it had made a mistake. I won’t be putting that much power into the hands of any software. I think anyone who agrees to such terms is a fool. And the software’s user agreement says you’re responsible for purchases the software makes in your name. Nope.

Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

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