David McElroy

The quality of your life is determined largely by the meaning you find in the relationships you choose, but many of us end up with broken relationships that need to be repaired. What’s just as bad is that we waste time with relationships that need to die.

We forget that the time we spend on a toxic relationship is time we can’t spend on a more healthy one. This is true whether it’s a romantic relationship or a close friendship or a family relationship.

The quality of our lives will change depending on the choices we make about shedding what she be dumped and healing the relationship that need to be repaired.

Preview of next week’s show: Why do we so often make the mistake of begging someone else to love us or to choose us? Don’t we understand that when we put so little value on ourselves that we beg for someone to love us, we’re setting ourselves up to be hurt — and we’re sending the other person a signal that we need them more than they need us.

You can’t force someone to believe you are worth making a priority. If you try, you will end up bitter, hurt and angry. If a person doesn’t value you enough to make you a priority, it doesn’t matter what he or she says — even if the words are, “I love you.”

Love is lived out through priorities and actions, not words and wishes. If you wait and beg to become someone’s priority, you’re not showing how much you love someone else. You’re showing how little you value yourself.

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Where is the line between what’s real and what’s just the wispy figment of dreams?

For years, I’ve dreamed about meeting a woman and a little girl at an underground train station. One of them — the woman, I believe — is wearing a solid red coat. Her daughter’s coat is either black or gray. They’re meeting me here, but I’ve never known why.

In the last week, I’ve dreamed about that station twice, for the first time in a long time. But there was something entirely different this time. In the dream, I was in my own house — not the modest house where I live now, but a grander house — and I heard a woman’s voice call to me from behind a wall.

I reached out with my hands and broke through the wall — ridiculous, of course — and discovered a secret stone stairway that led to a lower level. When I followed the stairs, I came out on a giant abandoned train platform. It was the same one from my old dreams.

This train station I’d seen for years was hidden under my own home. And the woman was there, too.

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Nobody ever thinks he or she will end up in a love-less marriage, much less an abusive relationship with serious physical abuse. So why do so many people end up with partners who are either abusive or who can’t provide what they really need?

Much of it is because we are so desperate for love when we’re seeking love that we’re easily fooled by love’s closest counterfeit — and that counterfeit love is always toxic in the end.

Preview of new week’s show: We often act as though we have forever to do the things we want to do in life, and we act we though we have forever to fix the relationships we’ve broken that we hope to repair one day.

My father taught me that. He had three children who once adored him. He had three different women who had loved him dearly over the years. But when he died, he was alone. The tragedy of his life is that he couldn’t repair the relationships he had destroyed. We’ll take a look at why we often delay repairing the relationships we need — and what we can do about it — next week on Love and Hope.

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