11/7/2023 0 Comments Nytimes love columnBut we aren’t a couple: We no longer share a bed, no longer smooch, no longer take turns making the salad, no longer give each other halfhearted back rubs, no longer dream of trips to Italy, no longer put our arms around each other in public, no longer fight about the shades being crooked, no longer outsource our intimacy to Netflix, no longer write checks to a couples’ counselor, no longer hope to fix it.īut for a while we were still enmeshed in each other’s lives, which is why I was caught in the act of doing a wifely chore by the woman with whom he is building intimacy and trust. The kindly pharmacist always asks for updates and sends his regards. Some of the neighbors still seem to think we are together. Technically, we are still married, although we have filed for divorce. We have been like this for more than two years. I dip into my ex’s apartment when a recipe calls for chia seeds, and he knocks on my door when I need help resetting the clock that is too high up for me to reach. Our 8-year-old son can run upstairs to beg his father to let him play Minecraft and run downstairs to have the Cheerios he likes with me. He and I live on separate floors of a two-family house in Brooklyn. I can think of few moments that better capture that time in our lives: me with my ex’s pungent laundry in my arms, trying to disappear as if I were the maid to a volatile celebrity.įor two people who need a prefix of negation to refer to each other, my ex and I have had a rather porous boundary between my place and his. “Hi, I was just getting his - ” I said before scurrying back downstairs, where I was doing our laundry. More recently, Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s “ You May Want to Marry My Husband,” a love letter in the form of a personal ad published 10 days before her death, led to a mass cry event - one that began, prepublication, among my own colleagues.When my ex-husband’s girlfriend stepped out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, beads of water dripping from her brown hair, she ran into me, the ex-wife, dashing from the bedroom they often share, with my ex-husband’s dirty clothes in my arms. Marriages worldwide resulted from strangers asking each other the 36 questions in Mandy Len Catron’s essay “ To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This.” And who knows how many spouses were subjected to exotic animal training techniques after Amy Sutherland’s 2006 essay “ What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage” went viral. Mary Alice Hostetter’s “ Dear Dad: We’ve Been Gay a Really Long Time,” detailing how she came out in her 60s to her 95-year-old Mennonite father, caused a Mennonite teenager in Lancaster County, Pa., who was struggling with her own sexuality, to write: “Reading this has given me hope that maybe, just maybe, I won’t be met with hatred if I ever decide to come out.” Heather Burtman’s “ My Body Doesn’t Belong to You” spurred story after story from women who also had been catcalled and harassed. The column has amused, enraged, enlightened and moved. In 2017 alone, people have spent more than 140 cumulative years reading Modern Love online and have downloaded the equivalent of 600 years of Modern Love Podcast episodes. The Modern Love Podcast, produced with WBUR-Boston, puts these stories on the air (and sometimes in theaters), with actors such as Emmy Rossum, Jake Gyllenhaal and Colin Farrell bringing their own interpretations. As the column has grown up, it has begun to try on new forms.
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