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

by Daniel Jones

Vulnerability is the animating quality of all love stories, and it can take many forms. In every case, though, vulnerability means exposing ourselves to the possibility of loss, but also—crucially!—to the possibility of connection. You can’t have one without the other. The stakes vary, of course, from dipping one’s toe in the water to taking a blind dive from a high cliff.

I didn’t care if he was a non-texter—and what does that even mean in this day and age? If you’re a twenty-something urban professional who doesn’t text, you’re pretty much impossible to be friends with. For a friendship to exist in 2015, people need to know they can text “ugh I love oysterrrrs” at 2:15 p.m. on a Friday and get a response by 2:30.

I am messy, lazy, and selectively kind. Other women have white sheets that are actually clean and little bowls filled with decorative stones. Other women keep orchids. Other women do yoga. I told myself this wasn’t true and we all have flaws, but I doubted other women’s flaws were as bad as mine.

Because real love, once blossomed, never disappears. It may get lost with a piece of paper, or transform into art, books, or children, or trigger another couple’s union while failing to cement your own. But it’s always there, lying in wait for a ray of sun, pushing through thawing soil, insisting upon its rightful existence in our hearts and on earth.

Making a fool of yourself for love is ultimately about you, about how much you have to give and the distances you will travel to keep your heart wide open when everything around you makes you feel like slamming it shut and soldering it closed.

Or perhaps that is love: a leap of faith, a belief in the impossible, the ability to believe that a little girl in a small town in Rhode Island would grow up to marry Paul McCartney. Or for a grieving woman to believe that a mother’s love is so strong that the child she lost can still hear her singing a lullaby.

When we met, I was twenty, he twenty-five. We were too young and inexperienced to know that people don’t change who they are, only how they play and work with others.

I used to think the final moment of life was the moment of truth, and I worried about it. I attempted bizarre feats of imagination, such as trying to will my own death during a moment of exquisite happiness. “Now,” I coaxed the universe, my eyes shut, my breath on hold, “take me now.” Because I knew all too well what tends to follow exquisite happiness, and I desperately wanted the universe to make an exception for me.

In her insistence upon getting things done, on living an ordered life, my mother managed to miss out on the nourishing aspects of family life and life in general: laughing at silly things, lying spooned on the couch with your beloveds, sharing good food, the tactile delight of giggling children crawling all over you. Without this, family life is an endless series of menial tasks: counters and noses to wipe, dishes and bodies to wash, whites and colors to fold, again and again in soul-sucking succession.