David McElroy

Terry Constable had no interest in Nick Saban when he started pursuing her back in West Virginia.

They were both in the seventh grade at the time and went to rival schools. They met at a 4-H science camp. In the years to come, he consistently pursued his crush, but she wasn’t interested. She was a city girl and he went to a smaller school in the country. Mostly, though, she spent six years — all through their junior high and high school years — dating a popular boy named Mick Shaffer.

It wasn’t until they were in college — Saban at Kent State in Ohio and Constable elsewhere — that they started dating long distance. Before long, they married and have now been together for close to 50 years.

Saban tells a story about a homecoming celebration thrown for him nearly 10 years ago to mark his growing success as a college football coach, most recently at the University of Alabama. He said it was a great trip home and he discovered that Terry’s old boyfriend, Mick Shaffer, had ended up as the owner of a service station.

Saban said he couldn’t resist the chance to brag a little about how well she had done by marrying him instead, so he drove by Shaffer’s station.

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I always recognize women with certain kinds of emotional wounds.

It’s never been intentional. It’s not even conscious. But some wounded part of my heart seems to silently spot the wounds in another, as though certain people are marked with an invisible tag — one which can’t be seen with physical eyes.

It’s only from this tiny group of women who share this invisible tag that I somehow choose someone with whom to fall in love. In this way, I’m unconsciously confessing my emotional wounds — and the woman who falls in love me with me is confessing her own woundedness, too.

It was years ago when a psychologist pointed this out to me. I had been going through a great period of self-discovery — about my childhood wounds and my adult failures to heal them — when I found myself in therapy about a relationship that had ended in a confusing way.

The psychologist acknowledged that she didn’t know the woman, but she said she could assure me that my ex had her own issues which were the equal of my own. She told me that I wouldn’t have fallen in love with this ex-girlfriend if I hadn’t been deeply wounded — and she said that the woman wouldn’t have fallen in love with me if she hadn’t had matching wounds of her own.

This past week, I heard someone express the idea in a far simpler way.

“Wounds attract wounds.”

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