David McElroy

About 10 years ago, I almost married Mary Poppins.

She wasn’t an English nanny, but if Mary Poppins had a 21st century American counterpart, this would have been her.

She was brilliant and beautiful. She was full of confidence, but she was charming and diplomatic when she needed to be. She was funny, creative and intellectually curious. And maybe more than anything, she was remarkably competent.

She was the sort of person who you could send to fix any disastrous scene of chaos and failure, because she would organize everything, give orders to those who would take them, charm those who wouldn’t take orders — and bring success where disaster had loomed.

She didn’t care what anybody else thought. She was determined to do only what her conscience told her was right. And she fiercely and protectively loved children.

In almost every respect, she was my ideal woman. And she was crazy about me, too.

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The lies we tell each other are nothing compared to the lies we tell ourselves.

Why do we do this? We have to lie to ourselves to justify the things we’ve done, especially the things we’ve done to other people. So one self-deception leads to another. Then when people go their separate ways, the lies and self-justification become more intense.

The longer two people are away from one another — and away from whatever happened between them — the more their internal narratives diverge.

Have you ever listened to two people — two people who once loved each other or two people who were once business partners, for instance — tell their stories about what happened to the dead or dying relationship? If you just listen and don’t challenge what you’re hearing, you would think the two people are telling entirely different tales.

I wonder whether two people can ever see the truth of what has happened between them as they drift apart — with someone slowly becoming “somebody that I used to know” to the other.

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