David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

Well, if you really want to know, this is what I’m still looking for

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Most of the email I get from readers here is asking for advice, so this was very different.

Amy was very direct. She told me she had started reading my articles a couple of years ago when her marriage was falling apart. She’s 28 now and divorced from a man she said was a terrible choice for her.

As she continued reading what I write — about love and life and my own needs — she started wondering if she and I might be interested in each other.

“I know this is very presumptuous,” she wrote, “but when I read about what you want in a wife and a family, I keep thinking we want the same things. But you’ve made it obvious you still hold love for someone from your past. I don’t know if you’re willing to find someone else yet, so I thought I’d ask.”

Amy had a number of interesting and insightful questions. With her permission, I’m sharing some of our correspondence with you.

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We project an image for others, but few see us as we really are

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How could someone know me for so many years and be so wrong about who I am?

That’s what I kept thinking Wednesday as a friend told me how he thinks others in our business perceive me. He wasn’t being critical in the least. We were just talking about the differences between different people we knew in real estate.

He told me that I come across as “extremely forceful” and “aggressive.” He said that a few words from me can be intense enough to be “intimidating” to others.

Then he said that I am extremely rational and unemotional in how I approach everything. He said he is very rational and isn’t as emotional as other people — but that I am even more calculating and logical than he is.

Forceful? Aggressive? Intimidating? It was hard for me to believe the words he was using, even though he was using them in an admiring way. I thought the face I present at work is toned down about 90 percent from what I’m actually thinking and feeling inside.

I had no idea that much of the intensity showed.

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Film hurts when I hear, ‘I’ve seen what we can be like together’

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I shouldn’t watch “The Family Man.” For me, it’s too powerful — and some of it hurts too much.

I haven’t seen this movie for about five years, but I came across a copy tonight. I wasn’t planning to watch it, but, somehow, I watched a few minutes. Then a few more. And then I couldn’t turn away. In some metaphorical way, I saw too much of myself in Jack.

Even more than that, though, I knew what he felt like — after he found himself transformed against his will — to know what his future could look like if he pursued love instead of selfishness.

And I know what it feels like to see Kate and to know she’s slipping away — to chase her and to beg her to have faith in a crazy dream. I know what he feels like when he delivers the sales pitch of his life standing in the middle of an airport: “I know we could both go on with our lives, and we’d both be fine. But I’ve seen what we can be like together.”

And that line crushes my heart each time I hear it, because I’m terrified Kate will get onto that plane anyway.

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