David McElroy

As soon as my friend Leah started dating a new guy two years ago, there were red flags. His actions made him appear arrogant, selfish, ungrateful and callous. But Leah put up with him. He makes a lot of money. He’s good looking. And he can be charming when he wants to be.

Leah has spent most of the last two years complaining about him and trying to change him. I try not to give people advice unless they ask for it, so I’ve listened without telling her what I really think of her ongoing drama.

I warned her in the beginning about what the guy is really like. From the first time he showed his true colors — before she was committed — I pointed out the issues. But Leah chose him anyway. She saw only what she wanted to see. So I kept my mouth shut.

Late Tuesday afternoon, I heard a therapist talk on a podcast about listening to a man complain viciously about his long-term partner. The therapist had finally heard enough, so he interrupted the man.

“Hey, dude” he said. “You got the pizza you ordered. OK?”

And I suddenly realized what Leah needed to hear.

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For just a moment, I thought she was going to cry.

She had turned her body and her face away from her husband and their two young children. I don’t think she knew anybody could see her. There was pain in her face. It wasn’t anger. It was the pain of disappointment and resignation. And then she pasted her mask back on and returned to the life which seemed to hurt her so much.

That’s what I saw anyway. Maybe I’m wrong. But for the long moment when I looked into her face and saw something that no human should have to feel, time slowed and I felt as though I could have reached out and touched her soul.

This was Friday night in the Walmart near my house, but I see similar pain on faces all around me, almost every day. I see people who I believe are miserable. It seems as though the pain and hurt and disappointment are etched onto their faces — hidden briefly by masks — and I wonder why nobody else seems to see what I see.

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Men and women are equal, but the two will never be identical.

Are the two 80 percent alike? 90 percent? More? Modern culture seems to want men and women to be interchangeable, but it’s simply not true in my experience.

Is an apple or an orange more valuable? Neither. Each has value. Each is a fruit. Each is wonderful in its own way. But they’re different, just as men and women are different — despite the best efforts of modern philosophy and leftist politics to claim gender differences are a cultural construct.

Men are physically stronger, but women have more power and strength in other respects, at least in heterosexual relationships. That’s the only kind with which I have experience, so that’s my context. Some people believe that men hold the power — in politics, culture, relationships, whatever — but my experience is that it’s a delicate trade-off, at least in healthy relationships.

Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida was popular in the 1950s and ’60s, and she understood this secret.

“Man does not control his own fate,” Lollobrigida said. “The women in his life do that for him.”

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