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.

When I said in my letter I knew my love couldn’t fix her depression, I was lying. I thought my love could fix everything, including her depression.

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.

In the past, when I asked my friends about their faults, they said things that didn’t count: They got frustrated sometimes or worked too much. These conversations inevitably ended with me saying, “Those aren’t bad enough,” and storming away. They didn’t say what I wanted to hear. That deep down, they weren’t sure if they were likable. That they were so irresponsible, they couldn’t imagine being mothers. They didn’t say they craved attention but had trouble giving it to others. They didn’t say how cruel they could be. These were surely the flaws he had seen in me.

What if he had seen my flaws and hadn’t texted because of them? What if he had seen who I was and hadn’t liked me? I tried to get beyond my immediate response (If he doesn’t like me, nobody likes me, and I am unlikable) and really think about it.

If he hadn’t texted because he didn’t like me, was that so bad? Relationships shouldn’t be about suckering people in with some sanitized version of yourself, only to spring the real you on them later.

Maybe he had seen the real me and decided I wasn’t for him. Plenty of things aren’t for me: running, action movies, owning a dog. None of those t...

Maybe he had seeds of doubt and realized what it takes a lot of other people years to figure out: that those seeds of doubt can spread tendrils through your body until they eventually strangle your heart. And then five years later, you’re having dinner together and all you can think is, “This isn’t right.” But by then, it’s too late.

he gave me a cactus. “These prickly little bastards is some tough hombres,” he explained. “Just like you and me. We may be in the desert right now, but I’m here to tell ya that we’ll get through this.”

❤️

Unlike women, for whom menopause serves as an unignorable transition, a line dividing one part of life from another, men have no midlife marker to brake before, or even to steer around, in the hinterland from their youth to their age; there is only a great, elastic middle. Is it any wonder they lose track of where they are, and think they can do anything?

Some guys say they know immediately She’s the One. Not me. Whether it’s a sweater or software, it takes some time for me to know if I want to keep something, one reason I always save receipts. I can’t say there was an instance when I looked into the pale blue eyes of the girl I met over corned beef hash at a café in San Francisco and thought, This is it.

Now, after eight years, I know. When did I know? Was it how she helped me deal with the death of my grandfather? The relief I felt when she finally answered her cell on September 11? That great hike in Point Reyes? Because she cried when the Sox finally won? The way my nephew greets her like a rock star when she walks into the room? Perhaps I should have known right from the start, that morning of our cross-country trip, when she required one last trip to Arthur Bryant’s for a half slab of ribs for breakfast (and ten minutes into the meal saying to me, “Hey, baby, why don’t you pop open a beer?”). Or did I not truly know until seven years later when we found ourselves forced apart for more than a year? Who can say? It’s the big moments, maybe, but it’s the little moments as much or even more.

I was no longer so pretty, but I was not so neurotic either. I had survived loss and mistakes and ill-considered decisions; if this relationship failed, I’d survive that too. And unlike other men I’d been with, Sam was a grown-up, unafraid of intimacy, who joyfully explored what life had to offer. We followed our hearts and gambled, and for a few years we had a bit of heaven on earth.

DATING FOR ME WAS ALWAYS like that video game: you try to follow the dance moves, and the further you get in the game, the trickier the moves become, until you are just a flailing mess.

It’s okay to fall deeply for one loser after another. It’s okay to show up at a guy’s house with a dozen roses and declare your undying affection. It’s okay to have too much to drink and call your ex twenty times and then to be mortally embarrassed when you realize your number must have shown up on his caller ID. It’s okay to stand at a phone booth in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, drenched like a sewer cat in the pouring rain, crying your eyes out because the man you are infatuated with has decided that he needs some space. It’s okay because I believe that all of these grand gestures and heroic attempts to follow E. M. Forster’s simple advice to “only connect” are not really about this guy or that guy.

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.

❤️

I’m happy now that I dated the DJ, the doctor, the candlestick maker. 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.

For most of my life, I had been given a slew of definitions around love and relationships that were easy to verify with Scripture, just as a flat Earth was once confirmed by looking at the horizon.

I was thirty-three years old when we adopted DJ, and I thought I knew what a broken heart looked like, how it felt, but I didn’t know anything. You know what a broken heart looks like? Like a sobbing teenager handing over a two-day-old infant she can’t take care of to a couple who she hopes can.

The thing is, I was the “something better.” I had already been found, and Christina was safe with me. I wasn’t going to let a broken system break down a child I loved. I hadn’t planned on being a mother to a teenager at twenty-eight, but I discovered if you threaten an injured cub in my den, I could become a mother right quick.

I wish more people would want to foster teenagers (although they, like me, may not consider it until one lands in their lap).

Exactly

Unlike the littler children, teenagers often recognize that their frustrations and sorrows are born of the system and their families of origin, rather than you.

We rode in silence, anger masking my fear. I focused on my breathing, on letting my affection return like a ripple moving toward the shore.

It’s the same feeling I had years ago that led to my decision not to have children. The decision came from my desire to be fully in my life as a writer rather than to raise a child. 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.

At thirty-two, I didn’t want her input on my every decision. How could she really know? Her job kept her overseas and we saw each other about twice a year. While she jokingly called herself “the Profiler,” I called her by some other names: “MicroMOMager” and “Smother.”

But a relationship that doesn’t work out isn’t a waste. There is no exact science or crystal ball.

As Hemingway once said, “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” Likewise, the best way to know if you are meant to be with someone is to be with him.

Yet in the end I was the one who went to sweep the corners clean, to save what was precious, and to close the door on his life. Don’t we all hope that when our time comes, we will have one such person left who will know what to do and feel privileged to do it?

A few summers back, I endured a bout of chronic stomach pain. At the time the thing had its own seismic agenda: rumbling, simmering, gurgling, even spurting little smoldering bits of itself up into the back of my throat. This was my body’s response to a brilliantly sassy but ultimately unreachable woman for whom, at the time, I lived and breathed.

“Heart sounds fine,” he said. “Very strong.” I wasn’t surprised. Women don’t begin to do damage to my heart until they’ve utterly ripped apart my stomach. I told him this.