David McElroy

It was just an odd computer glitch. Something with a reasonable explanation. It has to be. But I’ve sat here for the last hour or so looking at a photo I didn’t intend to find tonight. And it pushed some unexpected emotional buttons.

I wanted to find a photo on my MacBook from about 20 years ago, so I typed in a file-name search. Instead of things related to what I was looking for, the system turned up five photos that were completely unrelated to that. At the top of the list was a photo from seven years ago. I didn’t open it.

Then I worded the search an entirely different way. It gave me a handful of files again. At the top was the same photo which had been at the top of the search before. I felt mesmerized by the weirdness of what I was seeing, so I opened the file, even though I knew what it would be.

There were two faces. One was my face. The other face was that of a beautiful woman who I used to know.

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I’ve spent the last six week trying to work out a partnership with someone for my new YouTube video venture.

Someone with a lot of experience with profitable YouTube channels noticed the idea I was launching with DavidMcElroy.TV, so he approached me about joining forces. He and his partners have a lot of experience with marketing and growing YouTube channels, so it seemed like an exciting possibility.

But not everything is as great as it seems. Here’s a brief report about how things went.

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I’ve been falling in love with the same woman my entire life.

She’s had different names over the years. She’s had different faces. There have even been very real differences between her incarnations. But at the core, she’s always been my latest and most mature understanding of “the Ideal Woman.”

The ideal woman doesn’t exist any more than the ideal man exists. I know that. But it’s the best phrase I have for this abstract idea. I don’t know where I’m going with this, but it’s constantly been on my mind for the last week. I need to talk about it. Maybe I’ll have a point. Maybe not.

Think about a product that goes through generations of change over years, but it’s still recognizable as the same product each time. If you compare the first iPhone from 2007 with the current model, it would seem radically different. But if you compared the first iPhone to the second, then the second to the third — and so on, including last year’s model to this year’s — you recognize the same idea and same product. But the latest is radically different from the very first.

If you compared my first Ideal Woman with my most recent, you would see differences, but the core elements — the ideal parts in each of them — are startlingly similar.

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