— For 20 years, Modern Love has recorded people’s lives. The column has also had real-life reverberations on readers.
By Miya Lee
“So what have you learned about love?” people often ask when they find out I’m an editor of Modern Love.
“Oh, you know,” I say, “a lot.” Or, “Most clichés are accurate.” Or I delay, promising, “I’ll tell you later.”
In case we don’t meet again, I’ll tell you now: After 10 years of participating in this unique and precious work alongside my thoughtful boss, Daniel Jones, I’ve learned that love is like a form of energy — sustenance as integral to our existence as food, sunshine and the air we breathe.
And, like energy, I believe love is indestructible, constantly transferred between people, passed down from one generation to the next, durable through time and even death.
Joan Didion was correct when she wrote: “Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” Spend two minutes in the Modern Love submission inbox, and you will appreciate life’s fragility. Loved ones suddenly dying or becoming sick; deciding post-affair that they’re done with a two-decade marriage and don’t want any custody of the kids; or revealing a family secret that upends everything.
Just as common, however, are happy happenstances. Falling in love with a man who grew up on the same block as you and worked in the same building, but whom you didn’t meet until a chance midlife encounter. Talking to a stranger on the train who provides sage, unsolicited advice. Or witnessing a hawk — the likes of which you’ve never seen in your neighborhood — swoop down the day you and your wife visit the man who received your late daughter’s organs.
Many therapists insist that we routinely devise narratives about our lives. With Modern Love, I am always struck by a writer’s capacity to take a bad circumstance (or even an ordinary one) and turn it into a profoundly moving, wise or funny story.
Loving — and writing about love — involves choice. The choice to create meaning from raw experience. The choice to be bold and vulnerable, to reach outside yourself, to try to communicate and commune. As bell hooks wrote: “When we choose to love, we choose to move against fear, against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect, to find ourselves in the other.”
Below are eight accounts of how the Modern Love column reverberated in readers’ lives — how people around the world chose to move against alienation and instead see themselves in a stranger.
“As [my son and I] got our slices of pizza … I began a series of proclamations. ‘I will love you whoever you are. I will love you whatever you choose. I will respect the choices you make.’ He looked at me with eyes wide open, as if wondering if he could believe me … ‘You’re only starting to figure out who you’re going to be,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to be held back by what others think of you. You don’t have to match the people who love you.’”
In 2017 I read “Finding God in a Hot Slice of Pizza” from my flat in London. Though I couldn’t relate to the identity crisis of leaving an orthodox religion, I very much related to the trepidation involved in telling someone something that upends how “things should be,” when in my youth I came out to my family as gay.
I always felt from my mum what the author said to her son that day in the pizzeria. My mum lived in Canada (where I am originally from), and sharing newspaper articles over email was a way we stayed connected before she died last December. I sent her this column the day it was published, thanking her for being the type of parent who loved me unconditionally, always letting me choose what kind of person to be (and pizza to eat).
— Luke Costello, 39, London, Modern Love reader for 15 years
“Going to the hospital for a stillbirth is the photographic negative of going for a live birth. You carry the overnight bag, check into a room in the maternity ward and so on. But they put a marker on your door to alert the nurse-midwives that, in this room, things are different.”
“My First Son, a Pure Memory,” was published when I was 12 weeks pregnant with our first child. I had learned earlier that week that our daughter had a very high chance of anencephaly. I didn’t realize the gravity of the situation until the doctor asked if I had brought anyone with me to the appointment — I hadn’t. My husband came quickly, but the devastation had already hit me: Our baby was unlikely to survive.
The article was like a blueprint for our next few weeks. Tests were run, diagnosis confirmed, decisions made. I returned to this author’s words time and again.
What I learned most from these lines was empathy. Knowing that someone else had walked this same, very scary path gave me a sense of comfort, which I was then able to pass on to others. Our daughter Abigail was born still on Oct. 16, 2008.
— Margo Bassett, 46, Minneapolis, Modern Love reader for 20 years
“When he swept my body under, pinned me down, I felt the fright I knew all too well and did not care to know again. Then that memory crackled, like a glitch in the matrix, a program being overwritten by another … Wedged under him, as the old dread rose and then subsided in my chest, I realized he had really done it. Like an oyster, he had taken the painful grit of my past into the sanctuary of his embrace and smoothed it over into a pearl he was presenting to me.”
This essay, “Pinned Under the Bodies of Men,” took me by surprise as it articulated exactly the vague and sometimes specific fear so many women, including me, feel about physical intimacy with men. Her tribute to her husband — about how one man loving you with his whole being can transform your fear and pain into healing — gives me hope. Having read this, I feel now that maybe there are good loving men out there. Jerrine Tan, thank you so much.
— Suzanne Taylor, 57, Toronto, Modern Love reader for “probably a decade”
“Here’s the thing about marriage. We commit to sticking together for richer or poorer, through sickness and health and during good times and bad, assuming that the tough times are the stress test. But what if it’s the opposite? What if the hard times bring out our best and make us focus on what’s important, while the danger zone is when we grow so complacent that we can afford to obsess over a neglected shirt for eight months?”
When I find myself frustrated over the mundane (my husband didn’t clean up coffee grounds, didn’t put ice in the kids’ drinks and tracked in dust from his many garage projects), I think of the shirt in this gem of a Modern Love column. I think of how he’s supported me through a double mastectomy, my father’s death and a tough career situation. I smile at myself the way the author must have and realize that the very fact I have time to be annoyed by coffee grounds means life is A-OK! And then I sweep them up because I have the world’s best husband and, after all, I’m standing right there with a broom.
— Valerie Charles, 44, Kansas City, Mo., Modern Love reader for 15 years
“I’m now 59 with Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer. I still don’t have a partner, but I’ve fallen desperately in love with life. … I use each day to soak up the world’s splendor. ‘Not yet,’ I whisper to the heavens. ‘I love it here.’”
I was unprepared to navigate my life after the sudden, traumatizing death of my husband of more than 30 years to Covid. There were months, perhaps years, of despair, endless weeks of insomnia, numerous empty bottles of hard liquor that bore witness to my life’s downward spiral. Grieving is not for the weak. Grieving in a global pandemic that took your loved one is almost intolerable.
Seeing joy in my loved ones’ smiles, noticing nature’s vibrant, ever-changing beauty, hearing a child’s laugh and feeling butterflies when experiencing my “first kiss” after my last “first kiss” in 1986, are reminders that living a deep and meaningful life also includes sorrow and pain. Clare Cory’s Tiny Love Story reminds me that everyone is facing a battle. Our power to savor the gift of existence reaffirms my choice to forge on and continue writing my life’s story.
— Ellynmarie Theep, 63, Barnet, Vt., Modern Love reader for “five plus years”
“Some 24 years ago, I fed my child their first meal of solid food, a teaspoon of Gerber rice cereal flakes mixed with breast milk. Today, I spoon homemade cơm and cá kho between their chapped lips, as they murmur gratitude. Their arms are immobile to protect the line of sutures across their chest … They had top surgery so they can be who they feel deep in their soul. I cook Vietnamese food for their recovery so I can assure them they will always be my child.”
I remember taking a screenshot of “They Will Always Be My Child” long before acknowledging to myself that I want top surgery, too. The story parallels much of my own life, and when I read it now, I imagine it from my own mother’s perspective. When she fed me my first meal after adopting me from China. Her watching the countless tennis matches I played in high school and college. While I haven’t had top surgery yet, it’s comforting to realize that my mom would care for me like the mother who wrote the story.
— Lin Robertson, 26, Sacramento, Modern Love reader for “5+ years”
“By not calling someone, say, ‘my boyfriend,’ he actually becomes something else, something indefinable. And what we have together becomes intangible. And if it’s intangible it can never end because officially there’s nothing to end. And if it never ends, there’s no real closure, no opportunity to move on.”
Almost 10 years after this essay was written, I still refer to people as being someone’s “Jeremy”: A person who is ill-defined — neither a friend nor a lover. It can seem preferable to be a part of something than nothing at all, but when I was going through a bad breakup (with someone I never actually dated), my friend told me, “Just because he never did anything horrible doesn’t mean you should be with him.”
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that it’s better to take a chance on getting rejected. If not, your relationship will always be in limbo, partially created in your head.
— Victoria Yang, 26, Manhattan, N.Y., Modern Love reader “since college in 2016”
“Grief is exactly as painful as you think it will be, but with time you will learn to love your sadness because of the tiny shoots of joy and gratitude that sprout around it, like new growth on scorched earth. … As the sun set in fiery streaks over the mountains, I drove back to my family. When a farmer waved at me from inside a beat-up pickup, I thought about the comfort of sturdy, unglamorous things, my marriage among them.”
As an oncologist, I routinely witness — and experience — grief and loss. I often return to Michelle DuBarry’s words as a source of wisdom and comfort. While grappling with the death of a patient, I think about learning to love the sadness that accumulates within me. When I see my patients receive meticulous care and unwavering support from their families at the end of their lives, I think about the beauty of “sturdy, unglamorous” love. My gratitude to Ms. DuBarry for sharing her wise story with us.
— Neha Verma, 31, Baltimore, Modern Love reader for 10 years
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