Three Powerful Lessons About Love (Encore)
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Hey, it's Anna. The episode you're about to hear is from a special series celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Modern Love column. It originally aired in early 2024. We hope you enjoy it. ♪

From the New York Times, I'm Anna Martin. This is Modern Love.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Modern Love column. 20 years, can you believe that? Two decades of essays that have made us laugh, made us gasp, broken our hearts, reminded us of the fundamental goodness of people. And let's be honest, a lot of these essays should come with tissues. It's kind of our thing here, making you cry.

To mark this big anniversary, we've got a conversation with Modern Love founder Daniel Jones. Dan has edited around a thousand essays since the first one ran back in 2004. And when you spend all your professional time contemplating human connection, that work doesn't stay at the office. It impacts you in profound ways. So today, Dan shares the three essays that have changed the way he approaches love and relationships in his own life.

So it feels strange to say what I say to guests on the show, which is welcome, because really, you welcomed me into this universe. So instead of saying welcome, I'm going to say, Dan Jones, hello, and thank you so much. It is great to be back here. The Modern Love Column has been around for almost 20 years, which is a long time. And I do not say this in a rude way, but that also means that you are 20 years older than you were when you started it.

Is there anything that's happened in your life over those two decades that has changed your approach to the work or reframed it in some way? I've gone from being young to less young over that time. Delicately put. Yeah.

I started the column with children who are now very much adults and have gone through their own breakups and traumas and all of that and got out into the world and gotten jobs. My marriage of 29 years came to an amicable end.

My father died, and there's been a lot of tough family time since then. But I feel like my life was pretty stable during sort of the family-child rearing years. And then, oddly, time to the pandemic, I have to say. It's happened to many, yeah. It just like opened up, and it was like,

the column was saying to me, okay, you're going to experience the whole range of what you've been putting out there. And interestingly enough, I feel like working on the column for all these years has

has given me sort of touchstones and tools, and not just for me, for other people too, to be able to navigate difficult times in life. It feels like this churning reservoir of human experience that sort of feeds into your veins if you are open to it.

I love what you said, that you gave so much to the column, and now you're in this place in your career and your life where it's giving back to you. I mean, what a— It's like an annuity program. It's like, yeah, it's like a 401k. Right, right.

It's like a Roth IRA. That's a sexy way to say it, right? I'm withdrawing. I'm getting close to the age where I'm going to be forced to withdraw. People are loving this metaphor. Okay, so that's where you are now. But when you were starting the column, did you see yourself as an expert in relationships or in romance? I wasn't great at romantic relationships. I was like, how does this work?

How does this work? I was really terrible at it in high school. I was really terrible at it in college. Still found it really hard. I hit my first girlfriend in grad school. You took your wild. But very slow learning, very shy. But I think just the weightiness of romantic relationships is a scary thing. And...

I wasn't paralyzed with fear or anything. Like, I just, I assumed I'd get married, I'd have a family. Like, all those things were just assumptions and...

Didn't seem all that hard to make happen in a way. But the complications of relationships and loss and just all those big things, I felt like those were things that happened to somebody else. You know, those were out there and were these deep, dark wells that I hadn't really experienced and didn't have...

A sense of how to navigate. How did the people in your life react when you told them, like, hey, I got a new gig. I will be covering love and relationships at the New York Times. Did people, you know, how did people react? Some people were just, they were surprised that that would be my subject. Huh. And that would be my beat in a way.

To me, I don't think of love and relationships as being a beat. I think of it as being like the center of all life. It's like it's not off to the side. It's the center of things. Honestly, I don't like the word romance. It just feels like shallow and schlocky and whatever. But the word love like has it all. It's like that's...

the core of human existence, it seems to me. It's the stuff of life and loss and death and yearning and dreaming and all of that stuff. Have you come to that understanding of these stories about love or really stories about life? Did you enter into the column, the early days of this column, with that understanding or has that been worked out over 20 years of editing these pieces?

We started that way a little intentionally. We made it clear that the stories were not just about romantic relationships. It was a family of relationships and friendships and parenthood and the whole sort of gamut of human love and bonds. And in coming up with a title, Modern Love, we wanted an umbrella that was sort of wide enough to encompass love and the modern part of it

could mean a lot of things. To me, it meant something that was contemporary, like a way we connect that we didn't use to, a way we use technology, the way we have children that we didn't use to, all of those ways that are now. And we just thought modern would cover that piece of it.

Okay, so another big part of the column is that it's totally based on reader submissions, meaning anyone can send in their idea for a story and you select the ones you want to edit and then publish. Why did you go with that submission model as opposed to like commissioning stories from famous writers or other well-known people?

I just thought, let's just open the floodgates and see what comes in. I didn't realize at the time what a great idea that was. I realized later, I'm a genius. I'm a freaking genius for coming up with that. But not like it's any kind of new idea, but for this kind of a forum, it was essential and important.

As an example, we published a story by a Bangladeshi immigrant who'd been a taxi driver in New York in an arranged marriage from Bangladesh, had won the visa lottery and moved here. Then they settled in Queens. They had a daughter. She became a doctor.

And I asked him, what made you write this story, your love story from 30 years ago and bringing it up to now? Yeah. What made you submit it? And he said, oh, I've been reading Modern Love for 20 years. You know, I've been reading it every week. And he wasn't a writer. He'd just been reading the column and thought, I have a story.

All these people who have stories, they read stories, they think, what about my story? And that's something I was late in realizing, that it was just, it had drawn stories out of people who otherwise would not have told them. It felt like a safe space for them. They thought, well, other people have done it. Totally. So I could do it too. ♪

When we come back, Dan chooses the three essays that taught him the most about love with a little help from Jake Gyllenhaal and Connie Britton. Stay with us.

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and caffeinate larger with IQ Bar. Go to eatiqbar.com and enter code audio to get 25% off all IQ Bar products plus free shipping. Again, go to eatiqbar.com and enter code audio. Meet Cheryl. Hey. She's on vacation and lost in the moment. Unfortunately, so is her Chase debit card. It's got to be somewhere. Maybe she lost it at Salsa Night.

These skirts should have pockets. Or maybe she lost it at Pilates. Three and two and... But she's not worried. With the Chase Mobile app, she can lock her card till it turns up. Tools that help protect. One bank that puts you in control. Visit chase.com slash checking. Chase, make more of what's yours. Chase Mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data reads may apply. J.P. Morgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. All right, so Dan, can you please kick us off with the first essay you want to talk about?

Yeah. So this is an essay. It's called One Bouquet of Fleeting Beauty, Please. And the writer is named Alicia Gorder. So this is a story that begins with a young woman working in a flower shop, describing the kinds of customers who come in, the kinds of flower bouquets that they buy, and for what reason they

And you think you're in this sort of light, airy story about a flower shop. And then about halfway through, it takes a plunge in just this really troubling backstory where her high school boyfriend had died by suicide at age 18. And it throws this, what she's talking about at the flower shop into a whole new context. Yeah.

And in the end, it turns into a meditation of what, why flowers? Why are these the things that people rely on for these important transitions and moments in life? And comes to a wisdom at the end that has just stayed with me ever since.

And longtime listeners will remember that this essay was featured on the podcast years ago, back when we had celebrities and voice actors read the essays. Let's hear a part of this one performed, I think, really tenderly by the actor Carrie Bechet. There's a picture I took of him just days before I left for college, two months before he died. It was the summer of chips and guacamole dinners we shared sitting on the living room floor.

He's standing in the kitchen wearing a white t-shirt and jeans, one perfect half of an avocado cradled in his hand. His face is turned away, hidden from the camera. I like to think he's smiling. I remember the song we were listening to, the chatter of frogs through the screen door, my bare feet on wood.

Precious moments made all the more precious by the fact that they have already come and gone. Now I measure months by what's in season. Sunflowers in July, dahlias in August, rose hips and maple in October, pine in December, hyacinth in March, crowd-pleasing peonies in May. A favorite of mine is tulip magnolia.

The way the buds erupt into blooms and the blooms into a litter of color on lawns, all in a matter of weeks while it's snowing cherry blossoms. How startlingly beautiful impermanence can be. You said that it's that ending, and in fact it's that final line that really speaks to you. Can you tell me what you learn or take away from that line? It's sort of grown on me how startlingly beautiful impermanence can be.

It's not that love or connection is beautiful and impermanent. It's beautiful because it's impermanent. And the fleeting nature of any connection is what makes it precious and what makes it beautiful. And the way that she saw this, you know, in Petals on the Ground is,

that are soon to dry up and go away. But the beauty is in that it won't last. I mean, there's this section, I think, a little bit earlier than that, when she even poses the question quite directly, like, why flowers? Why do we give these things that are going to shrivel and die? You have to throw away, yeah. And I love what you're saying. It's not despite the impermanence. It's really loving because of it, because our time is. That is the arc of life. It's shortened with

flower blossoms, but that is it. It sometimes lasts a long time, sometimes a short time, but it will always feel fleeting in a way, that level of beauty. What does this essay make you think about in terms of your own life or your own relationships? To me, it's about, I mean, it's a buzzword we always hear about, but here it really comes home to roost is presence, is being present. And

It's always the hardest thing for me, for a lot of people, appreciating what you have now and not thinking about what you're building toward and what you're accumulating wealth for and what's to come. But the connections you have now that are beautiful in the moment and not fearing that you're going to lose them because you are, that's a certainty.

but just being able to be present and appreciate them. And the fact that it's this young woman who was able to artfully, in the midst of grief, compose such a beautiful piece that teaches that was just miraculous to me. I mean, you mentioned earlier that your dad passed. Did you return to this essay then? Was it in the back of your mind as you were processing all that? You know, it must have been because...

I was scrolling through the archive and saw that illustration and clicked on it. And I did see it in sort of a new way. I remembered how much I appreciated it at the time. But I was able to hold it together here. When I read it aloud to a friend who was sitting there when I was rereading it, I just couldn't get through the final lines. I was really broken up by it.

It sounds like this piece resonated with you and spoke to you in a different way years later, which is really powerful. Do you want to talk about the next essay? Yeah. So this one is called Nursing a Wound in an Appropriate Setting. It's written by Thomas Hoeven, who is a doctor. He's not a writer, but you would never know that. No, you would not. Reading this incredible essay. And...

I think about this essay all the time. This was published in 2013. He describes his relationship with his longtime girlfriend before he goes to medical school. They knew each other for 12 years. They were both the children of divorce and of unstable households that were scary. And they gave each other a sense of safety. He describes their relationship as being no fighting.

Fighting was what their parents did. Fighting would threaten their equilibrium, yeah. Fighting would threaten their love. And so it was a sort of a flat, safe relationship. They were together for 12 years. They got engaged. He was about to head off to medical school. And then she abruptly broke up with him. I think there were only a few weeks from their marriage. I think three. From their wedding. Three weeks. Three weeks. Wow.

And he was just devastated, doesn't begin to describe it. And he goes off to medical school for his residency. And it's sort of his boot camp in feelings and complications and devastation and real life, like real life.

And then after this sort of time in the wilderness in his residency and going through all this, he learns what real love is. Yeah, I mean, his idea of what real love is at the end of the essay is so powerful. This essay was also featured on an early season of the podcast. So here's Jake Gyllenhaal reading Thomas Hooven's essay, Nursing a Wound in an Appropriate Setting. Yeah, this one is so great.

My ex and I are not in touch. Our relationship, so long in the making and so quick to end, was like an ornamental piece of crystal. Aesthetically pleasing, but lacking resilience and once shattered, irrecoverable. Looking back at the various romantic and not so romantic dating experiences I had afterwards,

It's hard to separate my growth as an emotionally conversant partner from my development as a capable physician. Both happened simultaneously and gradually, through stretches of triumph and sorrow. There were no "eureka" moments, and neither ever really ended. The turmoil I experienced as an intern left me with a deeper understanding of how pain works, how it feels.

how it ebbs, and how it leaves you less naive. I also learned to open up to important facets of life that my previous relationship had locked out. Unhappiness, uncertainty, regret. Comfort around feelings like these is crucial in both medicine and intimate relationships. It's the basis of empathy. I didn't understand that before my ex left me, and I learned it the hard way.

By the time I met my wife, I was a changed man and a real doctor. And our love developed differently from any I had ever experienced before. Less like a crystal vase, more like a basketball. Our relationship is made for bouncing, for good and sometimes rough play that modern professional lives generate. We do have fights, oh yes we do, but they do not threaten our foundation.

They deepen it. Tell me what you take away about Thomas's articulation of what real love is. What is he saying? Well, this is one of these essays that I feel like mirrored my experience in a way. Like, I didn't come from a family of turmoil, but I'm afraid of conflict, total fear of conflict, don't like to fight, don't like to argue. My idea of a successful, romantic, loving relationship

was being in a harmonious space all the time. Or not all the time. Sometimes you'd be bored, but you wouldn't be fighting. And so this idea that fighting can bring you closer is revolutionary to me. It still is revolutionary to me. And not only that it can bring you closer, but it's the only thing to bring you closer and the only thing to deepen your relationship. Fighting can lead to end a relationship, definitely.

But the only way forward and the only way deeper is through conflict and resolving conflicts to a new understanding of the relationship and who you're with and the person you're with and getting to know them better and all of that. And I don't know what business he has writing this well about. You're like, listen, you're already a doctor. It's not fair to be like a doctor. And I know. And also to be able to write this well about and understand love this well and understanding

and conflict and depth. It's remarkable. So are you like fighting all the time now? No. I still need to learn how to fight better. We'll be right back. Meet Cheryl. Hey. She's on vacation and lost in the moment. Unfortunately, so is her Chase debit card. It's got to be somewhere. Maybe she lost it at Salsa Night.

These skirts should have pockets. Or maybe she lost it at Pilates. Three and two and... But she's not worried. With the Chase Mobile app, she can lock her card till it turns up. Tools that help protect. One bank that puts you in control. Visit chase.com slash checking. Chase, make more of what's yours. Chase Mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data reads may apply. J.P. Morgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC.

I gave my brother a New York Times subscription. She sent me a year-long subscription so I have access to all the games. It is giving us a personal connection. We exchange articles. And so having read the same article, we can discuss it. The coverage, the options, it's not just news. Such a diversified gift.

I was really excited to give him a New York Times cooking subscription so that we could share recipes. And we even just shared a recipe the other day. The New York Times contributes to our quality time together. You have all of that information at your fingertips. It enriches our relationship, broadening our horizons. It was such a cool and thoughtful gift. We're reading the same stuff. We're making the same food. We're on the same page.

Connect even more with someone you care about. Learn more about giving a New York Times subscription as a gift. At nytimes.com slash gift. Get a special rate if you act before December 6th. Let's talk about the final essay. This is an essay by Elizabeth Fitzsimmons. It's called My First Lesson in Motherhood. Can you tell me what that essay's about? Yeah, so this is a piece that ran on Mother's Day way back in 2007.

And it's yet another one that takes a really dramatic turn, several dramatic turns. And it's an essay about bravery when you didn't think you had the capacity for it. It's a couple who are having trouble getting pregnant and decide to adopt a baby girl in China. And they specifically fill out

form saying, like, we're new parents. We don't want any disabilities. We can't deal with anything, basically, except for just a perfect little healthy baby. And they get a baby who's chosen for them. By the time they get there and meet with the baby and are alone with her for the first time, they discover sort of alarming things.

physical problems, a really bad rash and a scar at the base of her spine, and hear a horrifying diagnosis that the child will be paralyzed from the waist down, will be incontinent, will have serious, serious problems. And unbelievably, they talked to the agents from the adoption agency,

And they say, oh, well, you know, we're sorry about this and essentially offer a swap for a different baby. Yeah, that's a moment that is kind of unbelievable in this piece. The view of human life in that circumstance. So this essay was read by the actress Connie Britton in 2016. And you can just hear the emotional stakes of the story in her performance. Let's listen to it. Yeah, she's really perfect for this one.

I pictured myself boarding the plane with some faceless replacement child and then explaining to friends and family that she wasn't Natalie, that we had left Natalie in China because she was too damaged, that the deal had been a healthy baby and she wasn't. How could I face myself? How could I ever forget? I would always wonder what happened to Natalie. I knew this was my test, my life's worth distilled into a moment.

I was shaking my head no before they finished explaining. We didn't want another baby, I told them. We wanted our baby, the one sleeping right over there. She's our daughter, I said. We love her. Yet we had a long, fraught night ahead, wondering how we would possibly cope. I called my mother in tears and told her the news. There was a long pause. I sobbed. She waited until I caught my breath. It would be okay if you came home without her.

Why are you saying that? I just want to absolve you. What do you want to do? I want to take my baby and get out of here, I said. Good, my mother said. Then that's what you should do. I mean, I'm tearing up. Me too. So the lesson in this piece to me is sort of about a test. It's really a test. It's like, what are you capable of? Like, what kind of devotion? What kind of sense of responsibility?

What are you going to take on? And they have to decide in the moment, are they going to, you know, stick with this child with this horrifying set of health complications that could control their lives forever? Are they going to push that baby aside and accept a healthier baby? And then, you know, how do they live with themselves if they do that?

Neither choice is an appealing choice. No. This essay, I mean, all of these essays bowled me over, and this one just made me... I mean, I quite literally called my mom after this. It is such a moving testament to just the completely inexplicable immediate bond between parent and child. I just like...

Yeah, I'm still kind of crying. I mean, it's just, it's remarkable. Tell me what you're thinking. I mean, you are a parent. Like, tell me what you're thinking about when you read this essay. Well, first of all, I'm thinking, I think anyone reading this thinks, what choice would I have made? Of course. And you would like to think that you would make the choice of keeping the child. But honestly, one of the most moving things and

tragic things that happened in the wake of publishing this essay is we got emails from people who'd faced this choice and made the opposite choice and either left with a healthy baby and struggled and struggled and struggled with having done that. More common was giving up on adoption entirely and just walking away, walking away from that child or any child.

But she's just like, I'm going to walk into this. Like, I'm going to just walk forward into this and it's going to be what it's going to be.

And miracle of miracles, like within a year or so, all that stuff has gone away. I know the kid is fine. I'm going to cry again. It's like after making this decision, they go home and she heals. Yeah. And she recoiled at thinking that was a reward for making the right choice. Like she said, it's not about that. It's not about like...

we were generous or we were good and therefore our child turned out fine. It's not that at all. It just happened that way. But it's yet another lesson in you can't predict the smooth path. You just have to sort of walk forward and be brave. I often say with modern love stories that are, you know, really about choices and

hard choices and how it's sort of ordinary people being incredibly brave. I mean, I often wonder what

What creates the person who can make the brave choice versus the person who shrinks from it? Like, what is that magic sauce? Or what is that childhood experience? Or what is the parenting that they had? Because there is a divide. Like, there is a divide often in those circumstances that we saw in the outpouring after the essay.

We see instances of bravery in all three of the essays that you've shared today. Bravery to embrace the brevity of love. Bravery to engage in fighting in a relationship. Bravery to make a choice. Would you define bravery as like a core act of love? Yeah, a core act of love and a core act of life.

People's bravery has been my biggest takeaway over 20 years of doing this work. It's never a person who says, I am brave. It's almost the opposite. It's people who say, I'm not brave. I'm a coward. Totally. And the lesson, just sort of the lesson of that, like life, it's going to be a mess one way or the other. Like you just sort of choose your mess. But that is what it is. That is life. You're not going to avoid it.

There's such a school of life that is about trying to make your life as clean and tidy as possible. And it's really a struggle to do that. And I'm not sure it's well-directed energy.

What do you think we should direct our energy to? And now this is just truly me asking you because I want you to give me life advice. If not to cleaning up our life... I'm not an advice giver, Anne. I know, but just please put on the hat for one second. Like, if not to direct our energy towards cleaning up our life in your 20 years of doing this work, like, what is the more worthwhile thing to direct energy towards? This is not exactly new advice, but it's really the wisdom from Alicia Gorder's essay, which is...

Be in the moment. Value the people you're with now. Don't think I'm planning for 10 years from now. Get your 401k out of your mind. Contribute to it, but put it out of your mind. It's the now. It's the now. That is the work. Dan, I love that. It's the now.

You know, I feel like so many listeners right now are clinging to every word you've said, trying to figure out what you're looking for in a Modern Love essay pitch. And by the way, you can send those submissions to modernloveatnytimes.com. Dan, can you give us a few quick tips on what makes a story stand out in your inbox?

Well, like a bad subject line is modern love submission. You're like, you know, 80% of people who submit. And a good subject line would include sort of an attempt at a title, which would be like, please, Lord, let him be 27. Please, Lord. And I read that. Yeah, I read that subject line. It was funny. It was smart. It was vulnerable. I just prayed the essay would deliver on that promise.

And it did deliver. We actually featured it on the podcast a few seasons ago. So a good subject line is very practical advice. But what about the essence of a story? Like, what are you looking for there?

harder to define quality is a sense of humility. Like there's a sense that you're not the smartest person in the world, but you do have something to offer. And in the world of pitching and of trying to get published, there's an overriding sense that you have to act confident. You have to sell your product. You have to say this essay is going to be perfect for you. And that's just the wrong approach.

That kind of confidence is not what a hard experience leaves you with. It can leave you shaken. It can leave you wise. But it doesn't leave you cocky. And I think it's important that the stories aren't really about answers. They're about a search for answers. And they don't need to come to a conclusion. But they need to present a problem in an interesting way that makes you think about it.

Well, now you're going to get even more submissions that can fuel the next 20 years of Modern Love. Dan, thank you so much for the conversation today. Thanks, Anna. That was a lot of fun. This episode of Modern Love was produced by Julia Botero, Christina Josa, Reva Goldberg, and Emily Lang with help from Davis Land. This episode was edited by our executive producer, Jen Poyant, and Paula Schumann. It was mixed by Daniel Ramirez and recorded by Maddie Macielo.

The Modern Love theme music is by Dan Powell. Digital production by Mahima Chablani and Nelga Logli. Special thanks to Larissa Anderson, Kate Lopresti, and Lisa Tobin. The Modern Love column is edited by Daniel Jones. Mia Lee is the editor of Modern Love Projects. If you want to submit an essay or a tiny love story to the New York Times, we've got the instructions in our show notes. I'm Anna Martin. Thanks for listening.