New York Times Modern Love

A story of love, loss, redemption and a podcast

We at times read words that stay with us much longer than a book does. The same happened with me when I read The Book of Ichigo Ichie. While the book was about the art of making memories, not much of its advice made it to my memory other than this line : Fresh water gives us more pleasure after thirst. Finding someone is a far greater privilege after we’ve experienced being sad and lonely.

An year into my break up, I often found myself wondering if what happened was truly for the best and if I’d ever find even a fraction of all that I'd lost. I’d spend most of my time at work ignoring the outside world. I was surrounded by a minimum of 500 people but I’d enter into the building with my noise cancelling air pods on. I’d deemed music too disturbing to my mental peace as most songs had romantic or sexual connotations. I had found my solace in podcasts, in an invisible voice talking to me telling me things I was interested in hearing without asking me to talk about myself. So everyday, I’d sit on my desk, work all day long right in the middle of those 500 people talking but lived in a completely isolated world, a world of many stories, one of which I’m writing about here.

About 15 years back, New York Times started a weekly column called Modern Love where people from all over the world shared their stories on relationships ranging from strangers, friends, colleagues, romantic partners, parents, siblings, pets, basically any equation built on love, facing loss, or dealing with redemption. With the huge success of the column, NYT started a podcast with the same name where people read some of the most popular columns. But this way of expression had some brilliant new features that the print lacked. A, the essays are narrated in the most soothing, emotion laden yet neutral tones but compelling voices. B, at the end of each narration is a section about where and how the characters of the story stand now, which is the most satisfying part as once you’ve gotten so engrossed in the story, you’re not left curious as to how the equation has fared over time.

Each podcast lasted 20-30 minutes and I’d hear quite a few of them in a day, multiplying that by the endless weeks I listened to them equals over a hundred yet they were so moving, their stories, their words so pivotal, that they got engraved in my head in spaces I am still reaching and discovering. If you’re someone who’s curious about people, about relationships, someone who wants to hear beautiful stories of passion and the human spirit from around the world, there is nothing I can recommend more than this podcast. Not only would you learn more about the different kinds of equations people build, or can build, you’ll learn to be more open as you hear people sharing vulnerably about why they engaged with a situation in the way they did. From stories of solidarity to war to illness to love to silliness, the podcast has a wide array of stories and characters and I can assure you if you hear enough, you’ll even find someone or something to relate to in it.

While I can talk of many extraordinary essays that are bouncing off the walls of my mind right now, I believe you can find them out for yourself as you go through the podcast. I instead want to steer this essay and talk about the one person out of the 500 who pulled me out of my world, who made some of the words I saved from those podcasts come alive for me and whose presence inspired me to write this essay.

Travel is one of my biggest passion. It’s what I live for, it’s what I work for, it’s what drives me and makes up a large part of who I am. Coming across this in one of the essays shook me. I was already struggling with the idea of being unable to share about my everyday life. But the idea of not being able to talk about what I loved the most was even more disturbing to someone like me who is a social media recluse. I started seeing travel as a burden.

I took a few short trips in my year of isolation and became quite reflective having to spend even more time by myself. I distinctly remember driving back from a trip sitting in a small car with my family with tears streaming down my face, eyes hidden behind my goggles, feeling helpless knowing I’d have nothing I’d want to share incase I was spotted by someone, growing even more scared about upsetting someone I cared about over something so trivial. Eventually I got used to this and started seeing travel as an escape, as my chance of getting away even further from the world that surrounded me. So much so that when I had to travel again with someone around, I intentionally cut off. A few months later when I was feeling a bit myself again, I had to take a big trip and I was extremely anxious and to my chagrin found someone around who gave me strength, who wanted to know the trivial details about my trip, someone who waiting for me at the other end, and I fail to put in words how beautiful that felt, how wonderful it was to know I had someone who was pulling me back and not letting me escape to the place I was in. This person made made me fall back in love with travelling again, he helped me connect to my passion in the way I enjoyed it rather than being scared of it and now every time I read this essay, I think of him, I think happily about how special that feeling is rather than getting anxious.

Over the course of a long term partnership, you end up sharing so much of your life that the other person knows most of what you know and all you have to do is add updates. When meeting new people, I felt like I was a toddler learning to talk. I had no idea anymore about how to start a story from the start, how to start by setting the scene, explaining the characters, explaining your beliefs. More often than not I stopped sharing as it seemed like too much effort to figure out who was interested in knowing what and how much was right to share. It became too difficult to give stories context and eventually a previously adjudged babbler, a person who was dying to share about her life turned taciturn.

Until a person felt comfortable enough to introduce me to the characters of his life, felt excited to screen a special preview of the movie of his life just for me. He helped me ease into sharing about myself, showed enough interest for me to be able to restart recounting the story of my life with all its scenes. He helped me rebuild a partnership where I could add updates to my stories like adding episodes to a sitcom instead of having to constantly restart the movie for different people to watch and judge before I could add a scene. He made me my talkative self again who finally had an outlet to share everything she had inside of her that she was struggling to express and in that process reminded her how important it was to talk, to have conversations in order to move forward and build new equations with new people you meet.

If I could, I’d write a modern love essay for this person who pulled me out of my secluded world, made me myself again and put me back into the real world. But till I can find better words to do that, I’d urge you to listen to the podcast and find your own bookmark worthy words and watch as life makes those words come to life.