David McElroy

Western culture loves perfection. Anything that’s imperfect is rejected or at least offered at a steep discount. When someone asks about a newborn baby, you might hear the cliche, “He has all his fingers and toes.”

In our culture of mass production, we judge quality by how perfectly the widgets pressed out of industrial machinery match each other. It doesn’t matter how boring or soulless or poorly designed a thing is. It’s a quality item if it matches its specifications.

I grew up steeped in that culture of perfection, but the more of life that I experience, the more I’ve found beauty in a kind of imperfection that comes only from brokenness.

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My friend asked the question out of the blue. I was spending the night with my friend, Larry, and I was lying on a twin bed in the corner of his room.

“What do you think about your mom being gone?” he asked.

It didn’t strike me as a difficult or important question, but something about the experience has burned everything about it into my memory. I was about 10 or 11 years old. Although my mother had been away from us off and on for years, the divorce had been final only for a year or two. She had no custody or official visitation.

I considered Larry’s question for a long moment. I felt very cold. Very hard. There was no emotion in my voice.

“I couldn’t care less if she moved to the Sahara Desert,” I said.

That’s all I said and Larry didn’t ask any more. It’s a good thing, because I might have cried if he had pushed to know what I meant. I was confused. I couldn’t tell if I felt nothing or if I felt more than I could handle. I swept the feelings under a rug in my heart — and I left them there.

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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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