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

by Daniel Jones

If I were Spock from Star Trek, I would explain that human love is a combination of three emotions or impulses: desire, vulnerability, and bravery. Desire makes one feel vulnerable, which then requires one to be brave.

“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.”

To win the person (or the job, for that matter), we think we have to be the most perfect version of ourselves. When our hearts are on the line, vulnerability can feel impossible.

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.

seemed my love couldn’t “fix” her after all, and even worse, she didn’t want to be fixed. Needing to be repaired is the No. 1 rule of being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl—how could she ignore it? 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. So our story ended, not with credits rolling to freeze our relationship in eternal bliss, but with crying and the division of possessions. (I kept the dining room chairs; she kept the old-timey typewriters.) It took a while, but I found someone new.

THERE IS NEVER A GOOD time to fall off your couch onto a martini glass, nick a major blood vessel, and begin losing a dangerous amount of blood, but having this happen in the middle of a promising date is an especially bad time. Nothing breaks the mysterious spell of blossoming attraction faster than spurting blood.

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.

As we stood there, mopping up bloody footprints with our Swiffers, surrounded by wadded-up pink paper towels, I thought, Either you will never see this woman again, or she will stick around a long time. Neither happened. I would like to be able to say my story ends in an epiphany, with the end of my anxiety and the beginning of an enduring relationship. But the reality is she left me about a month later. Not because she had found me repulsive in the fluorescent light of the hospital, but for a more conventional reason: She missed her ex-boyfriend.

But there are times when I finger its deep groove (a new nervous tic), those six beautiful hours in the emergency room flicker in my head, and I am reminded how close I am to an alternate world in which I am happy, a world that occupies the same space as this one but is somehow distinct from it. And while that better world may be difficult to find, it is as close to me as the air in front of my face.

The nail in the coffin was that at ten the night before I had texted him something vaguely sexual, and he hadn’t texted back. The morning had become a quick but emotionally turbulent journey through the five stages of grief. First: denial. It was entirely possible he hadn’t seen the text. He could have been in a deep sleep. He could have dropped his phone in the toilet. He could have died! Any of these options were comforting.

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.

It was early to feel so confident, yes, but in the happy haze of our four hours together, I had pictured us months down the road, walking hand in hand along a Chicago street. I had imagined him really liking me.

thought about the strange set of circumstances and coincidence that had brought Nate and me together. I told myself he was fortunate to have me as a friend. And while keeping an eye on him had allowed me to feel charitable and magnanimous, I knew my impulse had been anything but altruistic. In truth, Nate was the yardstick by which I measured my own progress, helping me to feel good about myself and preserve my own sanity. Nate, I realized, had become my Wilson. This overweight, slightly addled person munching carrots next to me was my life raft.

But there is no villain here. My therapist suggests I repeat this mantra to myself. So I do. THERE IS NO VILLAIN HERE.

composed bitter letters about how she was incapable of love, how she didn’t recognize the gifts I had given her. I did not send the letters. (Thank you, ten years of therapy.) I did not technically stalk her. I did ride my bike by her apartment building one evening, but I didn’t stay for any legally significant amount of time.

My friends tell me I need to love myself. I’m told this will make my life better, much in the way braces and clear skin were supposed to make me beautiful. When I ask how to do this, my friends become philosophers and say, “You need to find it within yourself.” Their advice is so abstract that I wonder if they, too, have searched and cannot find it.

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.

“Does she know you still love her?” I asked. “No,” he said. “She’s been engaged for two years now.” “Two years?” I said. “Why?” “I don’t know.”

I thought of him every day I was covering that war. When I was sleeping in caves, so sick from dysentery and an infected shrapnel wound on my hand that I had to be transported out of the Hindu Kush by Doctors Without Borders, my love for him is what kept me going. But a few weeks after my trip to London, he stood me up. He said he would visit me at my apartment in Paris one weekend and never showed. Or so I thought. Two decades later, I learned that he actually had flown to Paris that weekend but had lost the piece of paper with my address and phone number. I was unlisted. He had no answering machine. We had no friends in common. He wound up staying in a hostel, and I wound up marrying and having three children with the next man I dated. And so life goes. By the time Google was invented, the first photo of me to appear on his screen was of my children and me from an article someone had written about my first book, a memoir of my years as a war photographer. Soon after, he married and had three children with the next woman he dated. And so life goes.

I composed the email: “Are you the same man who stood me up in Paris?”

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.

Not only was I happy during my short years with Sam, I knew I was happy. I had one of the most precious blessings available to human beings—real love. I went for it and found it. I yearn desperately for Sam. But the current pain is very worth it. He and I often told each other, “We are so lucky.” And we were. Young love, even for old people, can be surprisingly bountiful.

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. I was clingy and desperate and wore my heart on my sleeve, falling madly in love repeatedly, only to meet with heartbreaking rejection at every turn.

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.

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.

Chairs scraped and we rose. I spotted an attractive guy and approached him. He beamed, came toward me, and then swerved to speak with the woman he really had in mind. I saw a second guy and scooted over. “Hi there!” I said. “Sorry,” he replied, and kept walking. I left, vowing never to attend a singles mixer again.

dim memory came to me of sitting in a music library a decade earlier, listening to an opera that I thought was terrible. “I remember listening to Tosca once, years ago,” I said. “It was so overblown.” A rather long pause ensued. Somewhere behind the lawyer, organizers urged people to take their seats. “Tosca is my favorite opera,” the lawyer said. It was all so deliciously awful: the mingling, how I was dressed, the futility of trying to meet anyone. Even when I tried to show interest in a person, I unwittingly flung an insult instead. I couldn’t help it: I laughed. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It was probably a scratchy recording. Or I was in a grumpy mood that afternoon.” “No doubt,” the lawyer said.

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

When I ask myself how I managed to get so lucky, I think: Because my life in music didn’t work out. Because I went to an expensive law school even though I had no money. Because I needed a well-paying job. Because the law firm assigned me Daniel as an officemate. Because Daniel sent me that email reminder. But most crucial, I think, is that I stopped hiding in the bathroom before it was too late.

When she crashed—twice!—we went back to my apartment, where I cleaned pebbles out of her skin and bandaged her ankle. Then we unknowingly went to a museum exhibition featuring gay and lesbian art, and I was forced to think about us. But I wouldn’t let myself acknowledge what was so painfully obvious.

My head spun. I waited for her to ask me those four fated words, but she was silent. The moment didn’t need words. I took the pen and wrote yes on the page. She put the silver band on my finger and gave me a matching ring to place on hers. Then she asked if I remembered the homeless man we met that morning after brunch. I laughed. “Of course! Why?” “I figured out what to do with those quarters. They were melted into our rings. Fifty cents each.”

As the days went by, Belinda sometimes began taking her turn on my transfer schedule without a co-lifter. “Doesn’t it bother you to come alone?” I asked. “Why? I can outrun you.”

And so it was that the man in a wheelchair, sardonic and standoffish, and the vibrant young woman who loved science and worried over how she would support her sons developed an odd connection, a link to a place where hands might touch, but thoughts and feelings and emotions began to flicker like lightning beyond the horizon.

I was past forty, my anger and frustration over being paralyzed mostly burned away. But it never occurred to me that the friendship, the connection, between Belinda and me might also be the bridge between caution and passion, between isolation and connection.

“I really don’t see the chair,” Belinda said a few months after we met. “I see you.” But I didn’t believe her then. I had been paralyzed too young, when I was too callow, and in a time and place where most people with disabilities were seen as invalids and shut-ins, passively accepting limitations and re...

“People have a right to dream,” she said.

I knew about despair. I wore it like a familiar coat, incapable of accepting what must be tolerated and petulantly ignoring what must be acknowledged.

I believed I did not deserve to love Belinda. I believed I should not allow her to love me. I held hard to the idea I should be content to ride out the remainder of my life without complaint, a burned-out case, an absurd hodgepodge of broken parts, a beggar who no longer wished for a horse. But she was also a woman, beautiful and vibrant, and I was a man—in a wheelchair, true—but a man full of heat and desire that sometimes rendered the chair irrelevant.

And I was the keeper of an obscene little secret I had known perhaps since I had been stuck in the iron lung, and surely from some vague moment later, the point where I realized I would never walk again. It is a thing that will sit rancid in my gut until the day I die, a thing that until then had eaten away at any illusion that love and marriage for me would be like it was in books or movies. And it was this: I would be physically dependent upon those who might love me. I am a chore, an obligation, and I will ever be so. I could not rationalize how a woman might love me and not soon come to hate the millstone I believed myself to be.

Friends. Lovers. Perhaps that day was a hint that there might be a path through the thicket of my insecurities. I only remember the gift, the magic, the seamless transition from what I could never imagine into that which I will treasure until my last breath. A kiss. A touch. The sweet scent in the shadow of her neck.

And somewhere deep in my psyche an old ugly beggar sleeps, unaware that the man Belinda chose to love has gotten on his horse and ridden away.

I want more time with Jason. I want more time with my children. I want more time sipping martinis at the Green Mill Jazz Club on Thursday nights. But that is not going to happen. I probably have only a few days left being a person on this planet. So why I am doing this? I am wrapping this up on Valentine’s Day, and the most genuine, non-vase-oriented gift I can hope for is that the right person reads this, finds Jason, and another love story begins. I’ll leave this intentional empty space below as a way of giving you two the fresh start you deserve.

I’ve heard people say that choosing to live on the streets is a kind of slow-motion suicide.

“Now, what brings you here?” he asked. “I drink.” “How often?” “Daily.” “Have you been drinking this morning?” “Affirmative.” “What about your arm?” “I have a cat.” “Must be some cat.” “I don’t really have a cat.” “I think you like to see the physical manifestation of your psychic pain.” “Who doesn’t?”

At our next date in the park, she climbed a rock and declared me too raw to date. “I think we should just be friends,” she said. I didn’t begrudge her this decision. If you were to take Julie’s suitors from over the years and place them in a police lineup, I clearly was the one who most likely belonged. We walked through the Ramble, across the Sheep Meadow, and to a clearing where the skyscraping hotels of Central Park South looked luminous in the gloaming. As the light disappeared behind the Palisades and a full moon shone, she turned to me and said, “If we weren’t just friends, this would be kind of romantic.” During our hermetically sealed days and nights that followed, I made her a promise that I would stay sober.

I sat on the toilet and started to cry. I had met the enemy enough times to know it by sight. Not now, I prayed. Please not now. Globs of mascara ran down my cheeks, and I wiped them away, heedless of the streaks they left. It was 7:57. I had three minutes to wrestle my brain chemistry into submission. Oh, sure, I knew there was another option. I could tell Jeff what was going on. But this was a man who didn’t even like his peaches bruised. What would he think of a damaged psyche? Maybe he would understand. Maybe I would find the courage. Maybe they would invent a cure. Maybe, but not tonight. As the doorbell rang and rang, I huddled in the bathroom, shivering. I was terrified—not just of Jeff finding me there, but of me never once finding love. When it was finally quiet, I rinsed off the rest of my mascara and tossed my cocktail dress into the hamper. Then I buttoned up my gray flannel nightie and settled in for the long night to come. I never heard from Jeff again.

The curtain moved and his surgeon appeared. “Good morning,” she said cheerily. Seeing her outside her office jarred me. Surgery was no longer a plan, but an event. I started to cry—softly, politely—though I wanted to wail and sob. How do you grieve for someone you’ve lost but who is still there?

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.

I pictured myself boarding the plane with some faceless replacement child and then explaining to friends and family that she wasn’t Natalie, that we had left Natalie in China because she was too damaged, that the deal had been a healthy baby and she wasn’t. How would I face myself? How would I ever forget? I would always wonder what happened to Natalie. I knew this was my test, my life’s worth distilled into a moment. I was shaking my head “No” before they finished explaining. We didn’t want another baby, I told them. We wanted our baby, the one sleeping right over there. “She’s our daughter,” I said. “We love her.” Matt, who had been sitting on the bed, lifted his glasses and, wiping the tears from his eyes, nodded in agreement.

And finally, of course, there are the “if onlys.” If only I’d moved west to be with my fiancé at the start. If only I hadn’t gone to that dinner. If only CSM and I hadn’t met at such an inopportune time. If only we could plan falling in love like a scheduled C-section.