David McElroy

I need your help.

This website has its 10th birthday a month from today and I’m considering some minor changes. Although I’m not looking to make radical changes, it would be useful to have reader feedback before I make some of the decisions I’m considering.

There are only eight questions and they’re broadly open-ended. You can share as much or as little feedback as you’d like. You can identify yourself or you can remain anonymous. The survey is through a third-party survey company, so I have no ability to track you in any way.

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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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There was a very brief period when I passionately wished I could have her back. It’s been so long that I have trouble remembering when it was. Maybe a dozen years ago? I’m not sure.

I no longer think about her very often — although I’ve written about her before — but I dreamed about her Tuesday night. I have no idea why. As I thought about the dream right after I woke up this morning, my first thought was, “Be careful what you wish for, David.”

In the dream, I still lived in the townhome where I lived for about 20 years in another Birmingham suburb. We had just married and she had moved in with me — but it felt more like a nightmare than a dream.

The narrative was less about her than it was about what she was doing to the space in which I lived. It felt very symbolic of something dark and dangerous going on in my mind and heart.

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