David McElroy

Valentine’s Day in this culture is all about love stories and feel-good fantasy. But what about those of us who don’t have love — those of us whose hearts are broken by need and emptiness?

For me, love has been closely associated with painful longing recently. I’m torn about what to think about this, because I feel something strongly that I perceive as the truth, but some psychologists and writers say that’s not healthy.

“Deep painful longing, yearning and craving are not characteristics of love,” writes Shari Schreiber, for instance. “If you think they are, you were emotionally programmed to believe this in childhood, when you couldn’t get your adoration for mother returned.”

If I’m deceiving myself about love, then our culture is filled with music from people who are similarly deceived by their longing. For Valentine’s Day, I’ve created a list of 10 songs that fall into that category. These aren’t songs about happy love. These are songs for those of us who are alone — and who are longing for love we can’t have.

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If you want to see the moral bankruptcy of the modern progressive left, the UK’s Guardian newspaper is often a good place to find it.

After the successful launch of an innovative new rocket by SpaceX this week, the intellectual rot was on full display at the Guardian Wednesday with an article called, “Why Elon Musk’s SpaceX launch is utterly depressing.”

The brilliantly successful launch and landing are depressing, according to the article, because there are people with basic needs around the world, so a billionaire such as Musk has no right to go spending his money on something the writer considers frivolous.

The writer laments that wealth isn’t “distributed fairly,” which he says is the only reason Musk has his billions.

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I watched the white-haired man walk slowly into the bank. He used a cane to steady himself. He moved slowly. He looked very frail.

I knew the face, but I didn’t really know that face anymore. I had known this man when he was young and strong and vibrant, not when he seemed more like the men from my grandparents’ generation.

But though I hadn’t seen him for years — and though he had changed a lot — this man was still my father.

Until today, I hadn’t seen anyone in my family for roughly eight years. Although I never would have called us this when I was a child, the truth is that we were a seriously dysfunctional family. We didn’t know that phrase then — and even if we had known it, we would have been in denial.

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