Modern Love, Revised and Updated: True Stories of Love, Loss, and Redemption

by Daniel Jones

That’s love. Anyone can have it. All it requires is a little bravery.

they pry open the oyster shell of human love to reveal the dark beauty within.

What makes movies magical is not that incredible things happen in them. Incredible things happen in real life. No, what makes movies magical is they end right after the incredible thing happens. They stop after the war is over, after the team wins the game, after the boy gets the girl. But in life the story keeps going and the boy can later lose the girl. “Happily ever after” is too boring for a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

Anxiety visits some people in violent bursts, like an electrical storm. For me, it creeps in gradually and insidiously, like a thickening fog.

I am messy, lazy, and selectively kind.

Maybe by not texting, he had given me the gift of the rest of my life.

But I had never dated anyone with blue eyes, and it was springtime.

was young and dating and independent, and I had highlights in my hair.

I had never been the girl of anyone’s dreams—not even my own.

I have never understood why some guys seem to think flattery is the key to a bedroom they’ve already been welcomed into.

It occurs to me that much of his success in this odd endeavor derives from the fact that he just didn’t know the whole thing was impossible,

It’s okay to fall deeply for one loser after another.

I hated his taste in music, and he was a terrible kisser, but I still cried a week later when he dumped me.

When I look back at those relationships, I can see that in the midst of all the drama I managed to have a goodly amount of fun.

That’s probably the beginning of love: when you see someone in a way that defies reality, but which makes perfect sense to you.

He is an easy man to fall in love with. I did it in one day.

I promised Julie that for better or worse, for richer or more likely poorer, I would love her with all the madness in my soul. It was one part vow, one part pose, and one part roll of the dice.

In love there’s no hiding: You have to let someone know who you are, but I didn’t have a clue who I was from one moment to the next.

Having a child was not how I wanted to make meaning of my life, not how I wanted to give back to the world. And the reason for this was my sense that I would love too fiercely, too desperately, at the cost of my self.

We would not have chosen the burdens we anticipated, and in fact we declared up front our inability to handle such burdens. But we are stronger than we thought.

I didn’t go on any dates right away, but the shock of getting so much attention from strangers based solely on my posted photograph lifted my spirits considerably.