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.

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

“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.”

know my love can’t fix your depression, but I still want you to know my love’s here and always will be.”

There was only so much life to live, and no time to spend it with people who weren’t the very best fit.

Would they still be happy and smiling in a year’s time, knowing as we did that to love is to risk great unhappiness?

I felt like I owed him an explanation, some ending to our story, but I just couldn’t do it. I had to keep moving forward.

I neither require the flattery nor deserve the ghosting. With hookups there’s no need to be mean—just say what you mean. Use your words.

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. Deborah Copaken is the New York Times bestselling author of Shutterbabe and The Red Book, a columnist at The Atlantic, and a staff writer on Darren Star’s new show, Emily in Paris.

had survived loss and mistakes and ill-considered decisions; if this relationship failed, I’d survive that too.

Alone, I could not be stabbed in the back, my serenity hijacked by someone else’s demons.

In pretending, we sometimes forget. But in pretending, we also remember.

“Love you whenever we’re together, love you when we’re apart.”

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.

Anyway, I learned that with my teenager you just have to hold on through the curves.

We were too young and inexperienced to know that people don’t change who they are, only how they play and work with others.

Sometimes I can’t help but wonder if the burdens we carry don’t end up carrying us.

“Your grief is like a house. One day you’ll be in the room of sorrow and the next you might be in anger.”

think of this divorce business as something like the flu. The feverish beginnings, as miserable and sweaty as they are, are somehow easier to get through (they are a blur, really) than the many half-well, half-sick days that follow, days when you’re not sure what to do. You’re too well to lie in bed watching TV but too sick to go out and do all the things well people are expected to do.

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.