David McElroy

Let’s say there’s something you need and want badly. It’s something you’ve spent half your life trying to find, because the lack of this thing has kept you from being happy. Now let’s say you’ve found what you’ve been looking for. It’s in a box in the next room. You’ve examined it and determined that it’s what you need. What do you do next?

If you’re like most people — and that thing in the box you need is love — you start inventing reasons to walk away without the box. And then you leave it behind, relieved that you made the right decision before you were stuck with what was in that box.

I’d say this is precisely what most of us do at one point or another. And though many end up being thankful about the decision to walk away, many others look at themselves quizzically and wonder, “What was I thinking when I walked away from that?”

I think most people today are desperate for love. I think it’s what we need and want more than anything else in our lives. Sure, we’d all like to have more money or more success or more power at work. Or some other random thing. But I think we pursue many of those things as substitutes for the love that’s missing from our lives.

Researcher Brené Brown has studied connection and vulnerability between people and has come to a simple conclusion about love. In her lecture series called “The Power of Vulnerability,” she was emphatic about what she has learned about what people need.

“…Love and belonging are irreducible needs of men, women and children,” Brown said. “I will go on the record as saying, in the absence of love and belonging, there is always suffering. Period.”

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After my junior year of college, I was offered a full-time job that was too good to turn down. The daily newspaper where I’d been working part-time for three years had a weekly newspaper in a smaller town about 15 miles away. The publisher of the smaller paper had taken another job and they needed a new managing editor, too.

Company management decided to take a big chance and offer the job to a brash 20-year-old who hadn’t even finished college.

I didn’t think much of my new boss. He had been the advertising director of the newspaper and had been promoted to publisher. After a couple of meetings with him right before I started the job, I was disdainful of him. Frankly, I thought I was too good for him. I was like an arrogant little child.

My new boss was named Jim. He was fat. He didn’t dress well. He didn’t present himself in an impressive way at all. He constantly smelled like a cigarette butt. He was so fat and out of shape that when I talked with him him on the phone, I would hear him wheezing a little, as though it was hard for him to take in enough air to support all of his weight.

I just saw him as a divorced loser who was alone in the world. How dare someone make him my boss?

As I started going out into the community as managing editor of the paper, I felt such a sense of shame about being associated with such a loser that I made it clear — quietly and subtly at first — how I felt about him. I was afraid of people thinking I was like him. I was embarrassed — more like humiliated — at the thought of anyone thinking he was really my superior.

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When I was 19 years old, I’d never seen any porn, but as a hormonal teen-ager with a normal sex drive, it sounded like a wonderful forbidden fruit. So I decided to buy a copy of Playboy to see what I had been missing.

I was nervous about it, but I went into a convenience store on Green Springs Highway in Birmingham and asked for a copy (since it was kept behind the counter). This was the first and only time I’ve ever bought any porn.

At first, I was amazed at what I saw. These were physically perfect women who were clearly ready to have sex with me — or pretty much anyone who would pay them, presumably. But after the initial rush of hormonal excitement died down, I quickly realized that the pictures didn’t arouse me in the same way that my own girlfriend did.

Let’s be honest. The women in the magazine were physically perfect in a way that my girlfriend couldn’t be. (I didn’t understand at the time that not even those women were actually physically perfect.) Physically, everything about them was just right. But I realized that I was far more attracted to my own girlfriend and to other women who I knew — women who couldn’t possibly be that “perfect.”

Why?

It didn’t take me long to learn something that I’ve never forgotten.

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