Modern Love

Garrett Schlichte was exactly twice the age of his sister. When he was 28 and his sister was 14, she would dish to him on the phone about her teenage love life. But the feelings she was experiencing — like electric attraction and aching jealousy — were unfamiliar to Garrett. When he was a queer, closeted teenager, Garrett turned to romantic comedies to grasp the emotions of a real-life relationshi...

Genevieve Kingston has carried a cardboard box with her throughout her life, filled with gifts for major milestones — childhood birthdays, her first period, graduation. The gifts are from her mother, who died of cancer just before Ms. Kingston’s 12th birthday. In her final days, she prepared postcards for the future and filled the box with her love. In today’s episode, we listen to Ms. Kingston’s...

Three months into the pandemic, Haili Blassingame was crafting an email to her boyfriend of five years, Malcolm, with the subject line “My Terms.” She wanted to break up. Haili had met Malcolm in college. At first she was “giddy about the cute guy with the deep voice who looked like Obama,” she wrote in her Modern Love essay. But as they started dating, she found that their identities were intertw...

Ariel Sabar was visiting his parents in his childhood home in California, when he awoke one morning to high-pitched giggles coming from his parents’ room. He opened the door to a Norman Rockwell-type image: his father, 70, riding his stationary bike in his pajamas; and his 6-year-old son perched on its frame, cheerleading for his grandfather. Ariel was stunned: “As a boy, I’d seen this house as a...

What are your dating non-negotiables? For Hyla Sabesin Finn, it was smoking — or so she thought.  Hyla met Larry in college. She was 17; he was a 21-year-old law student, puffing away outside the library. Hyla had been “indoctrinated by parents whose cocktail parties were littered with ‘no smoking’ signs back when smokers still mingled freely in society,” she wrote in her 2005 Modern Love essay. I...

Before Andrew Limbong went off to college, his mother cautioned him about the dire consequences he would face if he hugged a girl. Andrew grew up in a strict Christian household, and his parents are Indonesian immigrants, so they never spoke about sex at home. When Andrew was 20, he met his first girlfriend, Sam. He felt his cultural and parental influences putting “pressure on my blood vessels, n...

We’re back for a whole new season of stories. In today’s premiere, we introduce our new host, Anna Martin, who has a question for listeners: What’s the one song that taught you about love when you were a teenager? We listen to “What Lou Reed Taught Me About Love,” an essay about a young woman’s summer romance with a floppy-haired “rocker kid” and the records they would spin. Then, we hear from Tim...

At age 11, Julissa Arce came to the United States from Mexico on a visa that expired three years later. For more than a decade, she lived as an undocumented immigrant, fearful of revealing her secret to anyone. “Every phone call or email I got from human resources would make my blood run cold,” she wrote in her Modern Love essay. And when it came to love, she would lie to nearly every man she date...

What’s the secret to sibling success? Apparently, an ugly divorce. At least, that’s how it went down for Ellen Umansky and her two brothers. Ellen’s parents separated when she was 9. “They loved us deeply, but there were battles to be won — emotional, reputational, financial,” Ellen wrote in her Modern Love essay.  As Ellen and her brothers were flung into a new reality of parental feuds and convo...

It was Great American Eclipse of 2017 — the first total solar eclipse to cross the entire continental United States since 1918. Throngs of spectators gathered along the path to totality, from Oregon to South Carolina, to watch the moon blot out the sun for two-and-a-half minutes and the midday sky plunge into darkness. When Kerry Egan arrived at a field in South Carolina to witness the spectacle,...

What are the boundaries of an open marriage? And what are the boundaries of an open marriage when your wife’s boyfriend has an accident that puts him in a coma? Do you introduce yourself to the hospital workers as the patient’s girlfriend’s husband? Wayne Scott and his wife, Elizabeth Thielman, have a “creative arrangement,” as Wayne puts it in his Modern Love essay. They share the children, the c...

In 2004, the comedian Cameron Esposito sat on the steps of Boston City Hall and watched as some of the first legally married same-sex couples in the United States emerged victoriously as newlyweds. Thirteen years, three boyfriends and 10 girlfriends later, Cameron was ready to marry the woman she assumed she would be with forever. “I expected to perfectly navigate marriage like some sort of lesbia...

“Love life not working out? Health problems? Everything going wrong?” Amisha Patel used to be skeptical of astrological services that offered claims about the future. Her parents, who immigrated to the U.S. from India, would make annual trips back to Gujarat. When they returned to their New Jersey home, they would share predictions from Hindu astrologers about the fates of their children.  “I foun...

Last spring, Michael McAllister’s inbox started filling up with messages from heartbroken women. “I thought you were the man,” one wrote. “Embarrassing, but I kinda became obsessed with ‘you,’” another said. Michael discovered that his photos were being used to catfish women on dating apps — from Germany to Brazil to Chicago.  Today’s story explores a global dating scam (that’s still going on, by...

Kadine Christie’s birth story is one that has been told to her time and again. She was born in the mountain town of Spalding, Jamaica, in the presence of two women: her mother, Lorna, and a stranger, Lurline, who was going into labor in the same open ward. This is a story that feels like fiction, but is far from it. It has high stakes, unexpected connections and a surprising ending. Something asto...

Kacey Vu Shap had no desire to return to the Vietnamese orphanage of his youth. As a child, whenever he told people he was adopted, he would say that he came “premade” — that he spontaneously appeared one day at the Baltimore airport, greeted by a new family bearing flowers and kisses. “It was easier to sanitize my story by speaking only of my life as Kacey, who was loved and wanted, than to tell...

Welcome to our season premiere. Seven years into a serious relationship, Jake Maynard got a text from his mother: “Gramma Gert: 3, Jake: 0.” This was her way of telling him that his grandmother, in her 80s, was getting married for the third time, while Jake remained unmarried and childless in his late 20s. His family found this strange. Stranger still, at least in Jake’s view, was his grandmother’...

When Laura and her husband divorced after two decades of marriage, their “little Colorado mountain town” could barely tell. It was quiet compared to the dramatic natural disasters that were afflicting the area — like flooding and wildfires. There were no raised voices, no feelings of fury. So why did they split? In the lead-up to their divorce, Laura had a revelation about what good love — the kin...

This holiday season, it’s OK to want more. Paula grew up in foster care, and year after year she would find herself “clobbered by desire” when the holidays rolled around. She longed for a mother and father to rescue her and “make everything better”; she wished for the hip-huggers and games she saw on TV. When she was 21, she met a man named Jeff who ruptured this annual cycle of desire. He became...

This episode contains descriptions of domestic violence. In 2013, Courtney Queeney published an essay about surviving domestic violence and the legal proceedings that followed. She described going to a courthouse every two weeks to renew her emergency protection order against her ex. It was during this period that she found “scattered bright spots” — things to laugh about when everything seemed un...

When Bette met her husband, he was leaning against a wall at a party. He had, as she put it, “smoldering looks and banked fires.” He was from Brooklyn; she was from the Bronx. She assumed his silent “bad boy” vibe meant “dangerous love and dramatic heartbreak.” They got married, and she realized that she’d misread his quiet demeanor: “His eyes were simply beautiful, and his silence wasn’t fierce;...

Andrew and Sarah met on a dating app. Their first date was just supposed to be coffee, but it lasted nine glorious hours. They talked nonstop across four San Francisco neighborhoods. But by 2 a.m., Sarah had an admission to make. She told Andrew, who is Asian-American, that his “race might be an issue.” Andrew was shocked. The kicker? Sarah is also Asian-American. Today, we hear both sides of this...

Sarah and Liz met on a blind date in New York City. Sarah ordered a club soda with a splash of cranberry juice. Liz ordered wine — twice. A few weeks into dating, while taking a walk together through Chelsea Market, a feeling crystallized for Liz: “I knew in the way seasons change that I would love her before this one ended.” In order to make this work, Liz knew she could no longer hide from Sarah...

Feeling election stress? Today's stories about a man and his dog may help. Timothy Braun was on a run through the Texas heat. When he stopped at a local animal shelter for a drink of water, he was taken by a dog who stared at him with pointy ears and mismatched eyes — one brown, one blue. He had no intention of adopting a dog, but “out of curiosity, or God knows what” he looked into the dog’s fold...

In college, Malcolm Conner penned a rambling email intended for his crush. “You have cow eyes,” he wrote. “I know that sounds like a bad thing but have you ever looked into a cow’s eyes? They are so deep and brown and beautiful.” What he hadn’t disclosed — to his crush or to anyone at school — was that he was transgender and had transitioned at age 15. But he knew he had to tell this “charismatic...