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

by Daniel Jones

love, at its best, is more of a wheelbarrow than a rose: gritty and messy but also durable. Yet still hard to put into words.

“We get so fixated on the job we want or the person we’re dating because we don’t think there will be another. But there’s always another.” I thought that was so true. Even wise. But it’s easier to have that attitude, about jobs or love, at twenty-three than at thirty-seven.

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.

She could ignore it because she wasn’t a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She wasn’t a character or plot device in my story, or some damaged creature with deep despair that I and only I could cure as part of my “hero’s journey.” She was simply someone who had fallen out of love with her boyfriend. Which happens. It’s really uncinematic, but it happens.

I realize that meeting someone wonderful is the whole point of dating, but actually being with someone wonderful can be too stressful for me to enjoy.

but the great thing about depression is that it’s not one size fits all, but rather comes tailor-made to suit one’s particular personality.

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.

family isn’t something that happens, it’s something you choose year after year.

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.