David McElroy

People are going to hurt us. That’s one of the certainties of life.

People we trust will betray us. People we love will hurt us. When we are vulnerable, some people will harshly judge us, often misunderstanding what we’ve allowed them to see inside us.

Once you’ve been betrayed and hurt often enough, it’s easy to feel numb. It’s natural to feel distrustful and to want to shut others out. But one of the central realities of life is that we need other people. Whether we like it or not, we have to go on loving and trusting and being vulnerable.

For some of us, this is one of the central contradictions of life. We know what our experience has shown us, but we also know that the love and connection and trust which we so desperately need can’t be found without reaching out and hoping that everything will be different this time.

This has been the central struggle of my life — whether to trust and love in the ways that I need or to run away and hide as a misanthropic hermit.

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Sara didn’t like to talk about it, because she knew most people wouldn’t believe her.

She was a college student and going through a difficult semester. Her finals were about to start and she was spending all of her time studying. But she suddenly knew that something terrible had happened.

Sara had no idea what was wrong, but she associated it with her family, who lived a couple hundred miles away. She called her mother and asked if there was anything wrong, but her mother told her all was well.

In her heart, Sara was certain something was wrong, even if there was no rational reason to believe so. She went back to studying and made it through finals, but she never could shake the certainty that something was wrong.

After her last final, she drove home. When she arrived, her mother had some bad news. Her grandmother had died. The family had kept the news from her to avoid ruining her performance on finals. It turns out that the grandmother had died on the same day that Sara knew something was wrong and had called to ask about it.

But she has no idea how she knew something was wrong.

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My friend Josh surprised me tonight.

“If it hadn’t been for marrying Michelle, I would’ve been just like my brother,” he said.

Josh isn’t a guy who’s prone to introspection or to pondering psychology, so his insight surprised me. I wondered why it had never occurred to me instead.

Josh has a brother who’s pretty strange. I’ve known Josh and his wife for more than 20 years, and I’ve seen him change and grow in ways that I don’t think he’s always aware of. He doesn’t seem to realize just how much he’s changed, but I see him as a radically different person.

His brother, Brian, has never married. He’s dated off and on — and he says he wishes he were married — but he’s never had a serious relationship. Today, Josh and Brian are radically different people. Josh is easy to get along with. Brian is prickly and difficult. Josh is great at compromise, but Brian has to have everything his way. Brian is very hard to like.

Until tonight, I hadn’t consciously realized that Josh marrying Michelle saved him from being the difficult man that his brother has become. And that’s left me thinking about how the partner we choose changes us in radical ways — for good or for bad.

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