Anniversary. The Modern Love column, which gave rise to the series, turns 20; In this regard, its editor Daniel Jones says: “Reading nearly 200,000 love stories has taught me some things about him and life. These are the ones that help me the most”
Two decades ago, on October 31, 2004, a short article appeared on the front page of this newspaper along with news about the health of Yasir Arafat and the imminent elections between George W. Bush and John Kerry.
It read like this: “Modern Love: Introducing a new weekly column about love and relationships. Today, Steve Friedman says he’s fine after being dumped. Good. Really”.
Thus began my long and strange journey editing Modern Lovetalking every week to strangers about the most intimate details of their romantic entanglements, relatives and platonicand then publishing their stories to hundreds of thousands or even millions of readers.
I never dreamed I would still be doing this job 20 years later, but it has been a wonderful career. Over time, and with the help of my colleague Miya Lee, Modern Love has grown to include a podcast, books, live performances, another weekly Tiny Love Stories of 100 words and television programs in the United States, India, Japan and the Netherlands.
Modern Love started the same year as Facebookthree years before the iPhoneseight years before Tinder and 11 years before same-sex marriage became legal nationwide. The world has changed a lot in two decades, and so has my life. When I started writing this column, I was 41 years old, I had been married for 12 years and my two children were in primary school. Now I am 61, I have been separated for three years and my two children have long since left home to work and live independently.
I published hundreds of stories about separations, divorces, internet dating and families composed without ever thinking that one day they could be applied to me.
I have read tens of thousands of essays about the death of a loved one without experiencing it, until earlier this year, when my father died.
Millions of readers have found help in the many raw and inspiring stories of people trying to grow and change after the end of a relationship. Now those stories are helping me.
I was recently joking with my friend and podcast host Modern Love, Anna Martinsaying that this column has become a 401(k) for me, only it’s an annuity of life lessons. For all these years I have poured my ideas, my skills, and my heart into this column, and now it is paying me back, not in dollars, but in hard-earned wisdom. The good thing is that there is no penalty for early withdrawals.
Here I present—with gratitude to the wise, brave, and generous writers of this column—the seven lessons that have helped me most.
Love is more like a basketball than a vase
The relations imply conflicts that can lead to intimacy or distancing, union or breakup, depending on how you manage them. The way you negotiate conflicts may be the most important indicator of the compatibility of couples.
I have never felt comfortable with conflictsbut I’m trying to get better at it. That is why the test of Thomas Hooven of 2013, “Nursing a Wound in an Appropriate Setting”, affected me so deeply. Thomas was like me in many ways, thinking that a romantic relationship should be a refuge from conflict, not a source of it. Both he and his fiancée had emerged from a difficult childhood to find peace with each other, but anything other than peace was threatening to them.
His fiancée, perhaps sensing the fragility of this dynamic, broke off their engagement just three weeks before their wedding, leaving him devastated.
Thomas He began his medical residency in pediatrics, which became his training ground to learn the complexities and dark corners of love. He came out of there more human and stronger.
“When I met my wife,” he writes, “I was a new man and a real doctor. And our love developed differently than any I had experienced before. Less like a glass vase, more like a basketball, our relationship is made for bouncing, for the good and sometimes hard play that modern professional lives generate. We have fights (oh yes, of course we do), but they don’t threaten our foundations. They consolidate them.”
Your curiosity is more attractive than your achievements
The article of Modern Love most popular of all time, “The 36 questions that lead to love”, has been read by more than 75 million people. Nothing I have put (or will put) out into the world will bring about more positive change than that short article.
I hope most readers have learned the simple truth that being curious about the people you know is much more seductive than talking about your accomplishments. The most common complaint I hear (by far) about bad first dates is people who blabber on about themselves and don’t ask questions. So avoid self-promotion. Instead, be curious. If you need suggestions, here are 36.
Live in the present, especially with your loved ones
My son is 26 years old, but when he was little I used to read to him every night, the two of us curled up in a large armchair, as I had done before with my daughter. In his case, however, I had read him his favorite books so many times that he learned to recite them by heart while I turned the pages, even though he couldn’t read yet.
I wish I could go back to that time. The paradox of early parenthood is that it can be as stressful as it is joyful, and you often have to force yourself to relax in those precious moments.
Chris Huntingtonin his essay “Learning to Measure Time in Love and Loss”, he writes about a similar routine with his son, with the nuance that each night they also share their best and worst moments of the day. One night, preoccupied by his litany of worries, Chris realizes something is missing and says, “We forgot to do the best and worst moments thing. What has been your best moment of the day?”
“This is my best moment, Dad,” his son says, resting his chin on his father’s shoulder. “This is it.”
I teared up the first time I read that sentence, and I never forgot its lesson: Live in the moment. Stop thinking about the future or the past, what may or may not happen, and put your phone away. If a child on your lap asks you what the best part of your day is, say, “This moment.”
Write well, love well
The editor in me has realized over time that the qualities of good personal writing—honesty, generosity, open-mindedness, curiosity, humor, and humility—are the same as those of someone you’d like to have a conversation with. relationship.
Likewise, the qualities of bad personal writing—dishonesty, withholding, guilt, meanness, contempt, and selfishness—are the same as those of someone you wouldn’t want to be in a relationship with.
This doesn’t mean that good writers have good relationships or that bad writers have bad relationships. It means you must strive for being honest, generous, open, curious, fun and humble both in writing and in love.
Always lead with empathy
This is easy to say, but difficult to put into practice. However, I often think of a former Canadian soldier, Benjamin Hertwigwhose essay “In the Waiting Room of Estranged Spouses” recounts his discovery that his wife was having an affair.
They separate, and seeking help, Benjamin finds himself in a psychologist’s waiting room with the wife of his ex’s lover, a woman named Catherine. Incredible as it may seem, she has an appointment with the same psychologist at the same time and for the same reason. Catherine has a young son, and Benjamin ends up hanging out with them and feeling close to the boy. But he remains angry and bitter about the affair.
One day he meets his ex-wife’s lover in the supermarket, a man he has hated and had nightmares about. But nothing happens. The other guy meekly asks if he wants to have a beer and talk about it, something Benjamin scoffs at. But, as he writes: “I couldn’t muster any real anger. He was just a tired father of a child. “It wasn’t even unpleasant.”
“In the months that followed,” he continues, “thinking of my ex-wife’s lover as the father of that tender child was somehow very helpful to me. I had held Catherine’s child in my arms, I had felt the weight of her body, and over time I learned that it is difficult to hate a person when that person was part of bringing something good to the world.
Appreciate the beauty of impermanence
A compatibility question on a dating app asks whether you would choose to live forever if you could. Many people answer yes, which always surprises me: have they thought about what it would mean to live forever? Nothing that has no limits can be precious. Life and love are fleeting, that’s why we cling to them so much.
This is how he explains it Alisha Gorder in “One Bouquet of Fleeting Beauty, Please”, in which she writes about the flower shop she worked at in Portland, Oregon. Alisha reflects on the meaning of flowers on special occasions—weddings, funerals—and how they lose their petals and wither so quickly. Why do we appreciate flowers so much? Why don’t we appreciate something lasting?
Then Alisha tells us what this story is really about: her high school boyfriend committed suicide when she was 18, leaving her clueless about who he was and what they had together. alisha finds comfort in understanding that flowers (and love) are not beautiful and fleeting, but rather they are beautiful because they are fleeting. That means we must appreciate them in the moment, knowing that they cannot last. As she herself says when she sees the petals of a flower on the ground: “How amazingly beautiful impermanence can be.”
Relationships don’t have to last to be good
There is no rule that states that a relationship must last a certain amount of time to count as a “success,” just as one that ends has not necessarily “failed.” Every relationship we have, short or long, can be good, essential, even transformative, and have lasting value.
In “The 12-Hour Goodbye”, Miriam Johnson I was struggling to get over a breakup. Her boyfriend was leaving her for reasons she didn’t understand, even though they had talked for 12 hours straight. She thought they had been very good together. Their relationship had awakened in her a passion to seek a job related to animal welfare. After their breakup, he found an opportunity to work on it, which helped him restart his life. But he couldn’t forget his ex.
“We broke up a year ago,” she tells her therapist. “I thought my dream job and exercise would cure me, but I still think about him every day. What else can I do to let go?”
“You’re asking the wrong question,” his therapist responds. “It’s not about getting over it and letting go. It’s about honoring what happened. You met a person who awakened something in you. A flame was lit. The work is to be grateful. Grateful every day that someone crossed your path and left a mark on you.”
