David McElroy

I was already in love with her voice, so I would have done anything to stay on the phone with her that day. I didn’t care what we talked about. I just didn’t want her to hang up the phone.

But that was more than five years ago.

I find myself in an unusual part of town right now. It’s somewhere I rarely come anymore. But as I exited I-59 and turned down a street that felt quite seedy, I wasn’t thinking about why I had come or even about the dangerous neighborhood. I was having a flashback to the last time I was here.

And now I‘m sitting in a darkened parking lot. Waves of emotions are washing over me as I experience what I felt that day. If I close my eyes, I can imagine she’s still on the phone with me right now — just as she was that day.

I was in love with her. I was in love with her voice. Everything about her intoxicated me. And I would have done anything for that call to last for the rest of my life.

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I am angry.

It’s hard for me to admit that. I’ve written in the recent past — here and here — about the reasons for this, so I’m not going to waste time explaining the reasons again.

I spent most of my 45-minute drive home from the office on the phone. As I locked the office door, I made a phone call that I thought would take 60 seconds, but it dragged on and on. As I finally pulled into the parking lot of a restaurant for dinner, I realized that my muscles were tight and my jaw was clenched.

I felt incredibly angry. It wasn’t anger about anything that had just happened. It was more long-repressed anger seeping out. As I turned the car off and sat in the fading twilight for a few moments, I felt a rush of irrational anger and misery.

I wanted to explode. I wanted to cry. I wanted to angrily scream out to ask somebody why life doesn’t work the way I was taught it was supposed to.

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Our relationships with our parents often lay the foundation for what our future romantic relationships will be like, for good or bad. It can take many forms, but we are almost always completely clueless about the connection.

My mother abandoned me when I was a child and I grew up numbing myself to unconscious feelings of being unworthy of love. I ruined a number of romantic relationships and it took me many years to figure out that I was playing out that childhood drama with women I chose to love.

Was I determined to push away anyone who would love me? Or did I choose women who were destined to abandon me? I understand now that I‘m looking for the woman who will give me the right answer when I ask, “Will you abandon me, too?”

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