For 20 years, the Modern Love column has given New York Times readers a glimpse into the complicated love lives of real people. Since its start, the column has evolved into a TV show, three books and a podcast. Each week, host Anna Martin brings you stories and conversations about love in all its glorious permutations, dumb pitfalls and life-changing moments. New episodes every Wednesday. Listen to this podcast in New York Times Audio, our new iOS app for news subscribers. Download now at nytimes.com/audioapp
In the new movie “We Live in Time,” the actor Andrew Garfield plays a newly divorced man named Tobias who falls in love with a chef named Almut, played by Florence Pugh. Their story feels epic and expansive, but still intimate. It focuses on the small, everyday moments that make up a love story: washing dishes together after a dinner party, sharing biscuits, smelling fruit at a farmers’ market. These are the moments that sustain them through Almut’s excruciatingly difficult medical crisis.
In this episode, Garfield reads the Modern Love essay “Learning to Measure Time in Love and Loss,” by Chris Huntington. His reading was unlike any other in the history of this show. Mr. Garfield was so moved by Mr. Huntington’s essay that he spoke in a surprisingly raw way with the host Anna Martin about the need for art to crack us all open, including himself.
We want to hear from you! This year is the 20th anniversary of the Modern Love column, and we want to know what impact reading the column has had on you. Has reading Modern Love made a difference in how you think about your own relationships? How? Tell us by leaving a voice mail message at (212) 589-8962. Please include your name, hometown and a callback number, and you might hear yourself on a future episode.
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Courtenay Hameister worked hard to stop feeling shame about her body size, but she also had a cruel inner monologue that just wouldn’t leave her alone. At times, her internalized fatphobia was so powerful, she couldn’t think about romance at all. But when Courtenay started dating Jason, everything felt different. He was fat, too, as well as smart, funny, and handsome.
When Courtenay realized she was starting to gain weight again, though, she became obsessed with the idea that other people were judging her and Jason, and she made a decision she would immediately regret.
This episode is adapted from her 2023 essay “Were We the ‘Fat Couple’?”
Leave a message on the Modern Love hotline! This year (2024) is the 20th anniversary of the Modern Love column, and we want to know what impact it has had on you. Has reading Modern Love made a difference in how you think about your own relationships? How? Tell us in a voice mail message at (212) 589-8962. Please include your name, location and callback number, and you might hear yourself on a future episode.
How to submit a Modern Love Essay to The New York Times
How to submit a Tiny Love Story
Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show, and to other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.
On the HBO high finance drama “Industry,” basically everyone serves cruel insults. It’s part of the culture at their bank, Pierpoint. But Myha’la’s character, Harper Stern, goes after friends and enemies with deep, cutting verbal attacks.
Myha’la reads a Modern Love essay by a woman with the opposite problem: Laura Pritchett and her husband have avoided conflict for so long, she writes, that the fights they’re not having are tearing them apart. Myha’la also tells the host, Anna Martin, about the kind of communication style she strives to maintain, and what it’s like when she and her fiancé, Armando Rivera, find themselves in a fight.
The Season 3 finale of “Industry” drops Sunday night on HBO.
Laura Pritchett has written seven novels, including her latest, “Three Keys.”
Want to leave us a voice mail message on the Modern Love hotline? If so, please include your name, your hometown and a callback number in your message: (212) 589-8962
How to submit a Modern Love essay to The New York Times
How to submit a Tiny Love Story
Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show, and to other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.
The actor Gillian Anderson (“The X-Files,” “The Fall,” “Sex Education”) has become an advocate for sexual openness, whether through her on-screen personas, launching a libido-boosting soda brand, attending the Golden Globes in a vulva-embroidered dress or through her new book, “Want: Sexual Fantasies by Anonymous,” which showcases the secret fantasies of anonymous women, curated by Ms. Anderson herself.
Today, Ms. Anderson reads and discusses the Modern Love essay “On Tinder, Off Sex,” which follows a woman who becomes unintentionally celibate after a painful breakup. The author fantasizes about past and potential loves but can’t seem to break out of what her doctor has called “secondary abstinence.” Ms. Anderson tells us about a time she felt similarly, and how a good yoga practice snapped her out of it.
We want to hear from you. Tell us how love is showing up in your own life. Call in at (212) 589-8962 with your name, location and story.
Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show, and to other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.
Actor Peter Gallagher (Sex, Lies, & Videotape and The O.C.) met his wife, Paula Harwood, over forty years ago in college in a stairwell meet-cute. Since then, they’ve maintained a loving marriage and managed to raise a family while navigating the world of show business.
We talked to Peter on his 41st wedding anniversary, and he read us the Modern Love essay “Failing in Marriage Does Not Mean Failing at Marriage” by Joe Blair. Despite the essayist being kicked out of the house by his wife five times, the couple managed to remain married and learn that a relationship can mean trying together and failing together. Reflecting on the essay, Peter gave us his advice for staying the course.
Peter Gallagher will be performing on Broadway this fall in Delia Ephron’s play ‘Left on Tenth.’
Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show, and to other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.
On the Emmy- and Peabody-winning series “The Bear,” Liza Colón-Zayas plays Tina Marrero, a cook at the Chicago restaurant at the center of the story. Tina and her fellow workers are in a constant struggle for the survival of their restaurant, and they fight just as fiercely with one another. Only at rare moments do we see them drop the tough exterior and show one another love or respect.
Today, Colón-Zayas reads “A Web Between Her Body and Mine,” by Karen Paul. It’s a Modern Love essay about two friends who also met at work, but have a different kind of bond: Karen has no problem showing affection to her best friend, Miriam. But after Miriam has a terrible accident, Karen finds herself in uncharted territory, not certain when, or how, to support her. It’s a story Colón-Zayas says she relates to personally, and her reaction to it takes her by surprise.
Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show, and to other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.
John Paul Brammer writes the “¡Hola Papi!” advice column for The Cut at New York magazine, answering questions like, “Why am I dreaming about sex with a man when I’m a lesbian?” Or, “What if my partner judges me for writing smut?” This candor has given John Paul an intimate connection with his readers. However, as today’s episode reveals, he doesn’t think we necessarily need that level of openness with all of our loved ones.
Ahead of Mother’s Day, Brammer reads an essay about a recent college graduate who sets out to spend the summer exploring his sexuality, but whose plans are derailed by his duty to his grandmother. It’s called “Young, Gay and Single Among the Nuns and Widows” by Kevin Hershey. Brammer says it’s “bizarre” how much this essay resonates with his own life.
Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show, and to other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.
Emily Ratajkowski is doing a balancing act many famously beautiful women have to perform. In her 2021 book “My Body,” she reflects on what it’s been like to build a career based on her public image, and her struggle to control that image in an industry largely run by men. Since getting divorced a few years ago, she’s been thinking a lot about gender dynamics and the type of agency she wants to have in dating, too.
Today, Ratajkowski reads “Why I Fell for an ‘I’m the Man’ Man,” by Susan Forray. Forray is also a successful, self-sufficient woman, dating after divorce. She’s surprised to find herself falling for a man with old-fashioned ideas about who does what in a relationship. (He pays for dinner, handles the finances and initiates sex). As a single mom who handles everything, Ratajkowski says, she can relate to the desire to be cared for once in a while. And that doesn’t have to mean playing into a sexist stereotype.
Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show, and to other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.
Laufey, the 25-year-old singer-songwriter, has risen to prominence by taking the trials of today’s dating world — casual relationships, no labels and seemingly endless swiping on apps — and turning them into timeless love songs.
Today, Laufey reads Coco Mellors’s essay, “An Anxious Person Tries to Be Chill,” which is about a woman trying to work through her deep-seated relationship anxieties and attachment issues in an on-again, off-again situationship. Laufey says she, too, has been an anxious partner. While she thinks a toxic relationship, like the one in the essay, can make for a great love song, she now knows secure relationships can make beautiful music, too.
Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show, and to other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.
The actor John Magaro is picky about whom he goes to dinner with. Magaro is an adventurous eater. So whether he’s buying offal from the butcher, making stews from the 1800s or falling in love over a plate of rabbit, he says it’s important to him that the people he shares a meal with are willing to be curious. For Magaro, it’s about more than personal preferences. Sharing a meal and connecting with other people, he says, is the bedrock of society.
Magaro played Arthur in “Past Lives,” one of our favorite movies last year. His character is constantly working to understand his wife on a deeper level. And Magaro sees that quality in “My Dinners With Andrew,” by Sara Pepitone, a Modern Love essay about food as a love language, and a series of dinners that make, and break, two relationships.
Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show, and to other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.
Over the last two decades, Esther Perel has become a world-famous couples therapist by persistently advocating frank conversations about infidelity, sex and intimacy. Today, Perel reads one of the most provocative Modern Love essays ever published: “What Sleeping With Married Men Taught Me About Infidelity,” by Karin Jones.
In her 2018 essay, Jones wrote about her experience seeking out no-strings-attached flings with married men after her divorce. What she found, to her surprise, was how much the men missed having sex with their own wives, and how afraid they were to tell them.
Jones faced a heavy backlash after the essay was published. Perel reflects on why conversations around infidelity are still so difficult and why she thinks Jones deserves more credit.
Esther Perel is on tour in the U.S. Her show is called “An Evening With Esther Perel: The Future of Relationships, Love & Desire.” Check her website for more details.
Soon, you’ll need a subscription to keep full access to this show, and to other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don’t miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.
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