Modern Love

Mireille Silcoff recently wrote an article for The New York Times Magazine titled “Why Gen X Women Are Having the Best Sex.” At a time of life when many women describe feeling less visible and less desirable, Silcoff said, her life instead “exploded in a detonation of sex confetti.”

On today’s episode, Silcoff shares the juicy back story to her popular article, from her coming of age in Montreal to the surprising sexual resurgence s...

As U.S. poet laureate, Ada Limón has had a far-reaching impact. She has visited readers and writers across the country, installed poems at majestic sites in national parks, and she even wrote a poem that’s engraved inside a NASA spacecraft on its way to Jupiter.

Today on the show, though, our host Anna Martin talks with Limón about something more personal and intimate: What happens when writers fall hopelessly in love. She reads a M...

Growing up, Jamie Shandro was interested in science, while her younger brother, Tim, liked art. When they were in their twenties, they both landed in Seattle: Jamie for medical school and Tim for art school. They were closer than ever. But as Jamie was finishing up a rotation in psychiatry, Tim started behaving strangely.

In this episode of Modern Love, Jamie tells the story of the frightening onset of her little brother’s mental il...

If you know one thing about Orville Peck, it’s probably that he wears a mask. The country musician has long kept himself shrouded in mystery, shielding his face from the public and revealing few details about his past. His music, however, is full of emotional honesty and vulnerability — he told the Modern Love podcast that most of his lyrics are about his life — and his songs are imbued with a deep sense of longing.

In this episode,...

Natasha Rothwell plays characters who are constantly trying to improve and to better understand their desires. This season on “The White Lotus,” Rothwell, an Emmy-nominated actress, is back playing Belinda, a striving spa manager with dreams of becoming her own boss. Ambitions like these are relatable to Rothwell, who created and starred in her own show, “How to Die Alone.” But as she and her characters have learned, going after wh...

On her fourth solo album, “Forever Is a Feeling” (out March 28), Lucy Dacus contemplates the fears and delights that go along with falling hard for someone. The song “Best Guess” celebrates the leap of faith involved in committing to a partner with the knowledge that both of you will change over time. And in another track called “Talk,” a couple realizes they’ve grown apart because they have nothing more to say to each other. 

In th...

When Samaiya Mushtaq was growing up, she imagined marrying a kind Muslim man, and at 21, she did. But while studying to become a psychiatrist in medical school, she realized her husband couldn’t meet her emotional needs — something she deeply craved. Despite the shame she felt, she got a divorce.

In this episode, Mushtaq shares the twists and turns of her unexpected second chance at love, where service is at the center. From working...

In the movie “His Three Daughters,” Carrie Coon’s character, Katie, has rigid ideas about who her sisters are and what they’re capable of. When the women reunite to care for their dying father, those ideas become a barrier to true connection and care for each other.

In this episode, Coon reads the Modern Love essay “A Family Label, Ungarbled” by Harriet Brown. Growing up, the author was never sure she could feel real love. It took b...

For Kelsey McKinney, the author of the new book, “You Didn’t Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip,” spreading a good story occupied a morally gray zone throughout her childhood.

McKinney, who is also the former host of the podcast, “Normal Gossip,” talks with Modern Love’s Anna Martin about navigating the ups and downs of gossiping in her own life.

McKinney also reads the Modern Love essay “We Were a Party of Two, but Nev...

The Modern Love team asked you to share with us the moment you knew you were falling in love, and you delivered. Your stories took us to so many places — dinner dates, subway rides, sunsets, concerts — and showed us the many shapes of love. There were so many that we could not list them all.

In this episode, we listen back to your voice messages. Then, Daniel Jones, the editor of Modern Love, joins us to discuss the “36 Questions Th...

When Jacob Hoff and Samantha Greenstone met, they became instant best friends. Then, even though Jacob was gay, they realized that their feelings for each other were evolving beyond the platonic, and they decided to give romance a try.

On this episode, Hoff and Greenstone tell Anna Martin, host of “Modern Love,” how their love gave him the courage to come out to his conservative family. They also explain that when they decided to ge...

When Robin Eileen Bernstein’s almost-ex-husband, Mark, died of a heart attack, she suddenly found herself comforting her husband’s grieving girlfriend. Robin and Mark had been living apart for two years, but legally she was still the wife, so it was up to her to make the burial arrangements. Would offering to buy the girlfriend an adjoining plot make her feel less alone?

On this episode of “Modern Love,” Robin explains how she ended...

In a new memoir out next week, the singer-songwriter Neko Case shares some painful childhood memories. In the studio with Anna Martin, Case is open and unapologetically angry as she describes being treated like “an unwanted child.” Both parents, she says, struggled with trauma and addiction. They often left her with no food and only her pets for company. Case also reads a Modern Love essay about the complex heartbreak that comes wi...

Hank Azaria is used to putting on other personalities. You probably know him best from his work as a voice actor on “The Simpsons,” where he plays Moe the bartender, Professor Frink, Chief Wiggum and Snake Jailbird, among many others. His list of credits in stage plays, movies and TV shows is prolific, including roles like his Tony-nominated performance in “Spamalot,” Phoebe’s boyfriend on “Friends” and the dog walker on “Mad About...

When Clare Cory was a young girl, she dreamed of love. But by the time she turned 50, Clare hadn’t found it. Still, she took a look around and found she was happy and was looking forward to the future. Clare fell in love with life. She saw a flower bloom, watched sunlight sparkle on the water and held her cat on her lap. Her heart was full. 

Then, to her surprise, as Clare faced cancer and was about to turn 60, romance arrived. 

On t...

This week on the “Modern Love” podcast, we’re sharing an episode from another New York Times podcast: “The Daily.”

For decades, breast augmentations have been one of the most popular cosmetic surgeries in the United States. But in recent years, a new trend has emerged: the breast reduction. Lisa Miller, who reported the story for The Times, explores why this procedure has become so common with Rachel Abrams, the episode’s host.

This ...

It felt as if the dating world hit a breaking point this year. With news headlines like “Is Dating a Total Nightmare for You Right Now?” and “Why the Young and the Single Can’t Commit to Dating Apps” appearing frequently, it became clear that there was a lot of pent up frustration.

We gave you all the opportunity to let it out, and asked you to send in voice memos about your worst dates. We enlisted the help of the actor Joel Kim Bo...

Fake profiles. Unresponsive texters. Boring conversations. An endless stream of dudes on boats holding the fish they’ve caught. Talk to single people using dating apps, and they are likely to tell you that the experience is awful, but that they have to be there. Dating apps are just how singles meet one another these days. But what if artificial intelligence could fix modern dating? The Times reporter Eli Tan explored that hypothes...

When Daniel Jones started the Modern Love column in 2004, he called for submissions and hoped the idea would catch on. Twenty years and over a thousand published essays later, Modern Love is a trove of real-life love stories.

Jones has put so much of himself into editing the column over the years, but as he tells Anna Martin, the host of the “Modern Love” podcast, the stories shared in the columns have influenced him, too. Today, he...