David McElroy

I was 21 years old and working as managing editor of a weekly newspaper. I had just gotten out of a three-year relationship and I wasn’t dating anyone. As I worked alone at my office on a Sunday afternoon, a young woman dropped by to see me.

She was on her way back to her college after a weekend visit home. We had had a flirtatious relationship but it hadn’t been anything serious. Now that I wasn’t dating anyone, though, she had come to see whether I’d be interested in turning our flirtation into something serious.

I felt conflicted. I was attracted to her, but I knew I wasn’t going to date her. Maybe I wasn’t really completely over the relationship that had just ended, I told her. She understood. I kissed her as she left and we remained friends.

We both moved on to other relationships and I didn’t think any more about the conversation. I assumed she hadn’t thought about it for years, either. About a month ago, I realized that I lied to her that day — but only because I had lied to myself.

I decided it was time to call her — after all these years — and explain what had really happened.

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Amelia has been married for the four years I’ve known her, but she usually has a boyfriend, too.

Her marriage is unhappy and her husband travels for work. She keeps telling me about her latest boyfriend — the one who’s going to change everything and make her happy. I don’t remember how many of these have come along in the years I’ve known her.

Amelia saw me at dinner tonight and came over to talk for a few minutes. The man she told me two weeks ago was going to make her happy is now history. She changed her mind about him. There’s nobody new for the moment — and she was in an introspective mood.

“I don’t know what happens,” she told me. “When I first get to know a guy, I think I’ve finally found what I need. I’ve finally found someone who can really love me in a way that [husband] can’t. But after they fall in love with me and want me, too, I completely lose interest. I don’t know why.”

As we talked tonight, something clicked for me. Amelia doesn’t lose interest in these other men because she discovers something wrong with them. She pulls away when they get too close to her — and that’s when she has to find a justification for losing interest.

Amelia’s need for intimacy causes her to go looking for the love she doesn’t have in her marriage, but her fear of real intimacy causes her to run away whenever she thinks she’s found it.

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As I was getting gas for my car Sunday evening, a big church bus pulled into the parking lot. A few dozen noisy students from a Baptist church in Texas spilled out and headed inside for junk food to eat on the road.

I could have been one of those students not too many years ago. In high school, I was very involved in the youth group of my Baptist church in Jasper, Ala. We traveled in the summers through Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and North Carolina. In my last year with the group — while I was a freshman in college — we traveled to Oklahoma City.

As I watched those students tonight, I saw a young man and young woman standing apart from the rest. They appeared to be a couple — and they reminded me of the night on a church bus when I nervously asked a young woman if she was wiling to date me.

I have to smile at how little I understood at that time, about love or life. Even though the young woman agreed that night to date me — and we were together for three years — I know now that neither of us had the knowledge or wisdom to know what we were doing.

And the worst thing about a human life is that we almost never have the wisdom or knowledge we need — until it’s too late to really use it.

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