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36 Quotes From The New York Times' 'Modern Love' Column That Will Make You Laugh, Cry And Fight For Love

Read these when you need some real guidance from real people about your life and relationships
Jane Drinkard
July 11, 2016
“Although it may sound ridiculous to say ‘Don’t take it personally’ when your husband tells you he no longer loves you, sometimes that’s exactly what you have to do.”
— Laura A. Munson, Those Aren’t Fighting Words, Dear
Tagged: Breaking Up, Divorce
“The truth feels like the biggest sucker-punch of them all: it’s not a spouse or land or a job or money that brings us happiness. Those achievements, those relationships, can enhance our happiness, yes, but happiness has to start from within.”
— Laura A. Munson, Those Aren’t Fighting Words, Dear
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Heartbreak, Life, Advice, inspiration
“You can't expect a baboon to learn to flip on command in one session, just as you can't expect an American husband to begin regularly picking up his dirty socks by praising him once for picking up a single sock.”
— Amy Sutherland, What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Heartbreak, Life, Advice, inspiration
“I listened, rapt, as professional trainers explained how they taught dolphins to flip and elephants to paint. Eventually it hit me that the same techniques might work on that stubborn but lovable species, the American husband.”
— Amy Sutherland, What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Heartbreak, Life, Advice, inspiration
“After all, you have a lot going for you if you’re willing to commit to learning the fox trot when you hate dancing, or giving up your cherished Saturday-morning run for a regular bedroom session of holding hands naked while staring into each other’s eyes (and seeing where that leads).”
— Daniel Jones, Good Enough? That’s Great
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Heartbreak, Life, Advice, inspiration
“She was one of the most beautiful, charming, brilliant and funny people I had ever met, but it didn’t occur to me, until that soul-searching moment in my garden, that we could perhaps choose to love each other romantically.”
— Maria Bello, Coming Out as a Modern Family
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Heartbreak, Life, Advice, inspiration
“Whomever I love, however I love them, whether they sleep in my bed or not, or whether I do homework with them or share a child with them, ‘love is love.’”
— Maria Bello, Coming Out as a Modern Family
Tagged: love is love
“To Mark, I was not a problem to solve, a puzzle that needed working out. I was the girl he was falling in love with, just as I was falling in love with him.”
— Sara Eckel, Sometimes, It’s Not You
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Heartbreak, Life, Advice, inspiration
“Did we find love because we grew up, got real and worked through our issues? No. We just found the right guys.”
— Sara Eckel, Sometimes, It’s Not You
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Heartbreak, Life, Advice, inspiration
“I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children.”
— Ayelet Waldman, Truly, Madly, Guiltily
Tagged: True Love
“I cannot regret that when I look at my husband I still feel the same quickening of desire that I felt 12 years ago when I saw him for the first time, standing in the lobby of my apartment building, a bouquet of purple irises in his hands.”
— Ayelet Waldman, Truly, Madly, Guiltily
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Heartbreak, Life, Advice, inspiration
“OLD LOVE is different. In our 70s and 80s, we had been through enough of life’s ups and downs to know who we were, and we had learned to compromise.”
— Eve Pell, The Race Grows Sweeter Near Its Final Lap
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Heartbreak, Life, Advice, inspiration
“I had one of the most precious blessings available to human beings — real love. I went for it and found it.”
— Eve Pell, The Race Grows Sweeter Near Its Final Lap
Tagged: real love
“I tried to tell myself that I’m young, that this is the time to be casual, careless, lighthearted and fun; don’t ruin it.”
— Marguerite Fields, Want to Be My Boyfriend? Please Define
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Heartbreak, Life, Advice, inspiration
“Because, despite the fleeting nature of most of my encounters, and despite my own role in their short duration, I think what I have been seeking in some form from all of these men is permanence.”
— Marguerite Fields, Want to Be My Boyfriend? Please Define
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Life, Advice, inspiration
“I still want to believe that two people can meet and like each other well enough to stay together exclusively, without the introduction of some 1960s rhetoric about free love or other noncommittal slogans.”
— Marguerite Fields, Want to Be My Boyfriend? Please Define
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Heartbreak, Life, Advice, inspiration
“I worried that I may never again feel as completely safe and at ease as I did making funny voices for a French bulldog with him by my side, but you can’t control how someone else feels.”
— Tonya Malinowski, The Entire Netflix History of Us
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Heartbreak, Life, Advice, inspiration
“It’s just that my generation has turned this avoidance into a science, perfecting the separation of the physical from the emotional. We truncate whenever possible: texting over calling, meeting over apps rather than in person.”
— Emma Court, A Millennial’s Guide to Kissing
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Heartbreak, Life, Advice, inspiration
“My generation treats every liaison as if it is happening on an airplane, as if we have only that one night and there is no tomorrow.”
— Emma Court, A Millennial’s Guide to Kissing
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Life, Advice, inspiration
“I don’t know what else could have happened. But I wonder what we collectively lose as we try so hard not to care.”
— Emma Court, A Millennial’s Guide to Kissing
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Heartbreak, Life, Advice, inspiration
“Only now have I begun to see that letting go and trusting in the unknown doesn’t have to mean driving off a cliff, that leaps can be leaps of faith.”
— Kelly Thomas, Ready to Take a Faithful Leap
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Heartbreak, Life, Advice, inspiration
“I believed I should not allow her to love me . . . 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.”
— Gary Presley, Would My Heart Outrun Its Pursuer?
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Life, Advice, inspiration
“But now, more than three years after our first kiss and more than a year after our first time, I’m still not over the possibility of him, the possibility of us. And he has no idea.”
— Jordana Narin, No Labels, No Drama, Right?
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Heartbreak, Life, Advice, inspiration
“But by not calling someone, say, ‘my boyfriend,’ he actually becomes something else, something indefinable. And what we have together becomes intangible. And if it’s intangible it can never end because officially there’s nothing to end. And if it never ends, there’s no real closure, no opportunity to move on.”
— Jordana Narin, No Labels, No Drama, Right?
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Heartbreak, Life, Advice, inspiration
“Most people I know have a Jeremy in their lives, someone whose consequence a label can’t capture.”
— Jordana Narin, No Labels, No Drama, Right?
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Heartbreak, Life, Advice, inspiration
“Maybe it was the way he said, ‘I’d rather spend my summer with you than any other girl.’ Maybe it was how being around him made me forget the brace and the wounds, made me feel whole and unbroken.”
— Natalie Lindeman, Celebrating the Upside of an Emotional Plunge
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Heartbreak, Life, Advice, inspiration
“Finally, surrender became not just inevitable but exhilarating. I didn’t want to hold on to anything anymore. I wanted to fall, and I already had. And I knew that this time, too, I would be O.K.”
— Natalie Lindeman, Celebrating the Upside of an Emotional Plunge
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Heartbreak, Life, Advice, inspiration
“Twenty years and two children later, I am still with that same man. I don’t need him, but I want him in my life.”
— Karen Rinaldi, What Is a Man For?
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Heartbreak, Life, Advice, inspiration
“Absence was in the air, but presence too. My security guard lingered nearby.”
— Jennifer Couzin-Frankel, After a Suicide, a Security Guard for the Heart
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Heartbreak, Life, Advice, inspiration
“Unfortunately, years of schooling can’t teach you about recovering from heartbreak the way experience can.”
— Melissa Hill, Can Tylenol Help Heal a Broken Heart?
Tagged: Love, Relationships, romance, Dating, Marriage, Heartbreak, Life, Advice, inspiration