In honor of Modern Love’s 20th anniversary, we asked a dozen essayists to write a letter to the person they were when they published their essays.
We wanted to know: What would you say to that younger version of yourself? How has your life, and the way you think about your experience, changed since your story was featured in Modern Love? What have you learned, realized or perhaps reconsidered in the intervening years?
‘The Name That Has Always Felt to You Like Home’
In 2011, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, who uses “they/them” pronouns, wrote about adopting a python named Pretzel while wresting with their sexuality. When both Pretzel and the desire to date women become too large to deny, Alex gave the snake away and broke up with their boyfriend. Today, much has changed in Alex’s life (though one thing has remained the same).
Dear Alex,
Biggest update first: You came out as trans.
I know that’s terrifying to hear. It’s your biggest fear. When you realized at 8 years old that you weren’t actually a girl, you also decided that no one would ever know.
For so long, you thought that being brave meant having no fear and complete control over emotions. When you and your boyfriend Oren went to that pet store in 2011, you came home with Pretzel the python because you were afraid of her. You wanted to conquer your fears. You wanted to design your life so every fact about you, whether public or private, would be your choosing.
Back then, that definitely didn’t include being trans.
As far as you were aware, you’d never met anyone who was trans. Coming out as gay was scary enough, and so was writing about it for The New York Times.
But something beautiful happened when the essay was published: Your secret was out. You heard from others in your life who were queer, too. The secret you’d been so afraid of became just another fact.
That pattern will continue. You’ll write a book about other secrets from your childhood, which not only freed you from shame, but turned you into a writer and, eventually, a professor of writing. You’ll learn that fear isn’t so scary. Not because you can defeat or deny it, but because if you listen to what it’s trying to tell you, it will help you find your most authentic life.
I write to you now as Alex, the name you were known by as a child. The name that has always felt to you like home.
One thing has stayed the same, though. You now have a dog. Not a snake.
‘Protect Yourself From Peril’
Theo Pauline Nestor’s essay from 2004 chronicled the sudden dissolution of her marriage, which she likened to a space shuttle exploding midair. It was the fourth Modern Love essay ever published. Here, she gives her younger self some advice.
Dear Theo,
When asked what advice she would give her younger self, the actress Carol Burnett replied that she wouldn’t tell her a thing because all her choices brought her to exactly where she is now — thriving and content in her 90s.
And when I think about what I would say to you (the person who wrote this essay 20 years ago), I too am tempted to say nothing. Not just because I wouldn’t want to interrupt the flap of the butterfly’s wing, but also because I’m not sure you would know what I meant if I were to whisper in your ear, “Protect yourself from peril.”
“No, you don’t get it,” you would insist, gesturing to the debris of divorce all around you. “This is the peril.”
If I told you that the call might be coming from inside the house, you wouldn’t know what to do with that. You weren’t ready.
Ten years before the revelation that led to my divorce, I took an assertiveness training class in which we role-played, practicing statements like “I want a refund” and “I need you to stop yelling.” It occurred to me as I mouthed these words that even if I learned all the right phrases, it didn’t mean I would say them. Even if I did say them, it didn’t mean I would stand strong. And even if I stood strong, it didn’t mean that I would avoid spiraling into a vortex of fear afterward.
No, I wouldn’t interfere with the butterfly’s flap because my marriage brought me the greatest joys of my life — my daughters. But that also meant I had to experience more peril, more moments when I’d be unable to say the needed words.
Once, in a post-divorce relationship, I had a sort of out-of-body experience, hovering ghostlike on the ceiling above the scene in which I was being yelled at by my then boyfriend, thinking, Why am I here again?
Even though I asked myself that question, I still wasn’t ready to hear the warning: Protect yourself from peril. Protect yourself like you are one of your babies. Yes, you would have to “hunt, gather and keep shelter warm,” as you wrote 20 years ago, but know that you were also, slowly but surely, learning to give yourself what you weren’t given, to stand up for you. To say, “I need you to stop” and back it up.
You are getting there. Keep going.
‘Bro, Sam Married Us. Deadass.’
In his piece, which was a runner-up in Modern Love’s 2011 college essay contest, Andrew Limbong wrote about his Indonesian parents’ attitude toward premarital sex and how that affected his relationship with his then girlfriend — who is now, as he writes in his letter, his wife.
Not gonna lie, I hope whatever device The New York Times is using to send this to you fails. I hope you don’t read this. I hope you make the same mistakes, the same errors of cowardice, selfishness and idiocy. Why? Because it worked out. Bro, Sam married us. Deadass. You’ve been together this whole time.
Just the other day you two were talking about how you were going to “make it to Denny’s.” That rarefied status of coupledom where you’re old, but still so in love and in tune that you can talk trash about other people there without even saying a word. The guy with the dumb shirt? Roasted. The couple on an awkward early date? Roasted, too, even if you’re both a little jealous of being young and in love.
Also, you have a kid now. And you love her so much, too. The other day she farted and laughed, and you felt unfettered pride for the first time. Not the usual apprehensive pride you feel about your own accomplishments. No, what you feel is pure when she toots and giggles, like she’s getting away with something. By the way, she’s 1-and-a-half, not 14. But even if she was a teenager, you hope you’d still find it funny.
The questions you raise in the essay about sex and God and family — I don’t have any answers for you, dude. Mom actually likes Sam more than she likes you. You feel a little guilty thinking about going to church way more than you actually go to church. Sex is easier mentally, harder logistically. But instead of the comfort of answers, you’ve got Sam. And your daughter. You’re happy. Let yourself feel it.
‘What We Lost Cannot Be Recovered’
In her 2010 essay, Amy Seek grappled with her decision to place her biological son up for an open adoption. Now, in a letter to her pregnant, 23-year-old self, she issues a full-throated exhortation to make a different decision.
Dear Amy,
Open adoption is not the generous solution you want it to be, for you or your son.
You will spend 17 years visiting your son in his adoptive home, taking walks, playing Legos, waiting for him to grow up so that you can find out how he feels about his adoption. Every time you show up on his doorstep for a visit, you will steel yourself for the performance: You’re doing great; college is awesome! What will it cost him to think you are happy with this arrangement? You’ll practice subduing your feelings so you won’t threaten his family bond, and in the process you’ll lose your sense of self.
When he turns 17, he’ll begin visiting you. Over long conversations, he’ll describe the restlessness of having two centers of gravity. Adoption may double the love, but it splits you in two. He’ll say things that scare you, that reveal the impact of your separation. When you tell him you regret his adoption, you’ll fear it will somehow undo him, but he’ll say the world has never made more sense.
He’ll visit you often until, in his mid-20s, he’ll find an apartment close by. You’ll no longer feel dissociated in his presence, but integrating him will come with discomfort — like the way you felt seeing chunks of onion he left on the pot he cleaned — that some days makes you feel like a real mother, and some days irks you at a depth that feels profound. Is it grief about the many things you didn’t get to teach him? That what was lost cannot be recovered? You’ll hesitate to correct him; your motherhood gets stuck in your throat.
To my younger self, pregnant with a child you weren’t prepared for: You can survive adoption and so can he. The couple you found will do as good a job as you could ever hope for; you’ll soon learn it doesn’t always work out this well. But open adoption is not just unsimple math; for all the beauty in its complexity, it is a betrayal of your simplest desire, and his, for which you will forever count the costs. You are already a mother, and there is only one thing to do. Trust yourself: Keep him. You can do this.
‘Love, Before Will, Was Always in English’
Ross Showalter’s essay from 2021 was about Will, the first man he dated who actually made the effort to communicate by learning sign language. In his letter, Ross explores the radical impact of that action.
Dear Ross,
Three years ago, the paramount emotion you felt about Will was fear. There was nothing new about a budding romance. The steady commitment to learning American Sign Language was new. At 27, you thought you knew what love was. Love was friendliness, compromise softened by shared humor and a lot of lust. Love, before Will, was always in English.
You knew that Will could be different and that scared you. He wanted to see you. He already anticipated how draining lip-reading was for you, and he wanted to do something about it. The work of communication could be shared, instead of entirely on you.
A shared burden of communication meant shared understanding in this relationship, which meant you could open up about yourself. You didn’t have to keep your distance. You could allow someone to get close to you.
Now, three years later, you and Will are still together. Three years later, love fills you until there is no space left for those old anxieties. Will validates your frustrations, your joy, your uncertainties. Will pauses movies and TV shows to ask, “What is your relationship with your sister? Do you believe in God? Did you ever read ‘The Hardy Boys’ growing up?” It takes work to remain curious and open about each other.
It takes work not to turn away when you are being held accountable for selfishness, even when those moments come — that Will correctly guesses — from feeling lonely for a long time.
Over time, the emphasis on ASL has lessened. Over time, you two toggle between sign language and English, but you will always try to communicate. Over time, you will ask yourself how you can be less selfish, less temperamental, less impulsive. You can be a better person, simply because Will believes you are.
The fear came from not knowing if he might accept every messy, unsavory part of you. After three years, you know you have nothing to be afraid of.
‘You Thought You Had Failed’
Larry Smith’s 2010 essay detailed his weekly trips to see his then fiancée Piper Kerman, who wrote the memoir “Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison,” which was adapted into a television show. In his letter, he shares why divorce is not a sign of failure, but the means to write a new story.
Dear Larry,
A few years after you married Piper, she shared these six words in a collection of short love stories you edited: “Found fellow cliff-diver; best risk ever.”
Your romance, marriage and decision to have a child were a series of leaps into the unknown. Each choice was a hard-won part of the story of Piper and Larry, one that would span nearly 30 years from the time you two met in a tiny breakfast spot in San Francisco. It would include one year of prison, 15 years of marriage, five different cities, seven seasons of Piper’s television show, three answers to “Jeopardy!” questions and four therapists; before finally arriving at the most gut-wrenching, necessary, but loving decisions of all: to break up. I know, I know — you didn’t see any of that coming. Who does?
After that happened, you started hearing the same two words, over and over in hushed tones, from well-meaning friends and family: “I’m sorry.” And you thought you had failed. Because no one thinks the vows they made in front of a justice of the peace, Elvis, or in our case, 108 people, will be broken. This was not how this story was supposed to end. You’ll think about the moment when Piper walked down the aisle to your friend Tessa singing Tom Petty’s “Wildflowers” and remember that beautiful song on that beautiful day. But then, one day, you will realize that on that same album Petty sings “It’s Time to Move On.” And it will be.
Slowly, surely, and finally quite clearly, you will tell yourself a different story: That the people you were when you met are very different from the people you will become. That 25 years was a success.
And once you crack open the space in your heart to allow a new story to come into focus, it will find you. And it will be wonderful.
‘I Remain a Hopeless Romantic’
Elizabeth Chang’s essay from 2022 was about an ephemeral romance blossoming in her temporary home, the basement of a university library. As she slept, an admirer left a note in her shoe and, despite her initial hesitation, she was charmed. They’ve since parted ways, but, in her letter, she recalls meeting again and what that represented.
Dear Elizabeth,
This year, I returned as a graduate student to the library where you lived nearly 15 years ago. There’s now a sign stating that visitors who stay past 1 a.m. will have their IDs checked. The sofa you slept on is still there, but your now-tender backbones cannot fathom spending the night.
I kept the note that he left you when you slept there. Four years after his last email, I asked him to meet up. As I waited in front of the restaurant, I fantasized about how it’d be a reuniting of kindred spirits. But when he arrived, he said my name like a question. Was this who had kept a hold over me all these years?
Dinner was silent with the shadow of past worlds we no longer shared. He was still in college because of his military service, while I was navigating my career. As we ate our overpriced vegetables, I asked him if he had gotten together with his soul mate.
His face was blank. “Who?” he said.
He hadn’t ghosted me for some grand reason. Somewhere along the way, I had imagined a connection stronger than the one we shared only because I couldn’t have him.
Recently, I ended an engagement with another man when we became unrecognizable to each other after seven years. Married friends talk about long-term relationships mellowing out. I just don’t want to settle down. I want to live adventurously while my relationships maintain the intensity of a third date. But it feels like I have to give up holding someone close in order to discover new parts of myself.
As a child, I wanted to live with my friends. I wanted my friendships to have the same value as romantic relationships. Couldn’t multiple people better meet my varied needs? Now I have friends to meditate with, to travel with, to go dancing with on a Thursday night. Some people know several sides of me, some people only know one deeply. In aggregate, they know all of me.
In my library locker, I now hoard Soylent instead of canned food. The dollar pizza joint is no longer a dollar. But people still laugh and splash one another in the campus fountain, and you remain a hopeless romantic.
‘Quit Hating Yourself for Failing to Repair Your Son’
In his 2009 essay, Joe Blair wrestles with his son’s disabilities, ultimately deciding to honor his son’s deep love of the ocean by moving to California. In his letter, Joe comes to embrace certain truths about himself and his son.
Dear Joe,
Fifteen years ago, when your son Michael was a little boy who fixated on the wave pattern his belt formed when he wiggled it at a certain frequency, when you cycled him through all those antipsychotics in a failed attempt to quiet his aggressive behavior, and before you decided it was best to put him through the agony of brain surgery in a failed attempt to stop the grand mal seizures — when you believed that no matter what, you’d find a way to repair your son — The New York Times published an essay you wrote about him.
Now I have the opportunity to send you a communication. I don’t want to waste it by dispensing advice, but since I know you more intimately now than I did when you wrote that essay, I’ll do it anyway.
I know that you believe it’s important to have a dream. And you believe that your highest calling is to ride off, lance in hand, in a mad attempt to catch that dream and make it a reality. But there is another calling just as high, though far less dramatic — to ride off, lance in hand, in a mad attempt to accept the unchangeable circumstances God has presented you with.
Quit hating yourself for failing to repair your son. Move in the direction of accepting and loving yourself.
Quit thinking of Michael as someone you need to fix. Move in the direction of accepting and loving him the way he is. Since it is the way he is.
‘Is That How We Survived?’
In her 2006 essay, Asha Bandele wrote about falling in love with and marrying Rashid, who was incarcerated in the prison where she taught poetry. In her letter addressed to him, she chronicles 30 years of love, spanning the birth of their daughter, a divorce, a deportation — and finally, peace.
Dear Rashid, my ex-husband,
It’s 1998. We’re three years married, seven together. We’re not parents yet. You’re in prison. But our love is insistent.
Like you, I survived prison with an avatar; she dealt with the harm, the humiliations. Only you had true access to me, from my skin to my soul. And then, unexpectedly, we gained the most impenetrable of shields: the fierceness of a parent’s love. Our daughter was born in April of 2000. Every choice we made was to achieve one single outcome: her wellness, joy and freedom.
Three months later, you were ordered deported. You fought the court for the family life we’d always imagined. I fought for only the life I held in my arms.
I can’t detail the years between 2000 and 2008, even as we lived them, no longer as husband and wife, but still inexorably bound. I should have known your brilliant mind and your persistence would convince the court to hear an appeal. We all came to testify: me, faith leaders, cops and officials. Two months later, the judge revoked the order! But the government challenged the ruling, and then you were gone.
I sank into depression and drank too much. Your life was threatened once you’d arrived in a Caribbean country you hadn’t lived in since you were a boy. You looked like everyone else but you were not embraced. There was resentment about men like you, “deportees.”
But maybe because life is a series of valleys and peaks, solace came. I stopped misusing alcohol as quickly as I’d started. You settled into a supportive community abroad and built a small business. I returned to writing seriously, even publishing a New York Times best seller. And our girl? She graduated from Columbia University with honors in 2022. She’s studying law at New York University, where she’s a Dean’s Merit Scholar and on Law Review.
How do we end our calls with “I love you” and still really mean it? I met you when I was 20-nothing, and I hadn’t learned all the ways the world can break you. By 40, I learned it would let you bleed out alone. At 50-something I wonder, was I wrong, Rashid, thinking love was a weapon? Was it possible that love was actually the single strategy and solution? Is that how we survived? It is why we remained?
Asha Bandele is an award-winning author and journalist. She lives, works and parents in Brooklyn.
‘You Still Have a Home in Fernando’s Heart’
In her 2020 essay, Julissa Arce described how the fear she felt as an undocumented immigrant caused her to lie to every man she dated. But then she met Fernando and everything changed. In her letter, she shares how her bond with Fernando has only grown stronger.
Dear Julissa,
During a book signing in Texas, a giddy woman said to me, “So you divorced the man that gave you papers and then you married someone else? You are awesome!”
My troubled romantic past had felt isolating, not awesome. The subsequent healing journey that led me to meet and open up to my now husband was painful. But how to explain to a stranger that because I grew up scared and undocumented; lying to my love interests had been a matter of survival. Romance and vulnerability had been completely sucked out of my heart, leaving my life like a flattened vacuum-sealed bag, impervious to outside air.
I have been a U.S. citizen for 10 years. I am now a mother to a child that anchors me even more to California, the land of my ancestors before the Mexican American War. But if I really want to let people into my life, I still have to explain so much. In that way, nothing much has changed since you, my younger self, shared your story with Modern Love in 2020.
But I am glad that our sweet husband, Fernando, who accepted you after you told him the truth about your first marriage and past, still understands you. One night a few months ago, after the temperature in our house had cooled after an argument, I asked him, “Do you think I am crazy?”
We seemed to be having a lot of disagreements since our daughter was born.
“No. I think you’ve had a hard life,” he said gently.
The kindness in his response reminded me of the night he stayed on the phone with me for over three hours while I drove from Fresno to Los Angeles. I’d had a threatened miscarriage while I was on a work trip. He reassured me that no matter what happened, we would survive it together. We chose the name of our daughter that night.
Four years later, love, thankfully, is still not all up to me. I don’t have to hide or be ashamed of my past or my present struggles. You still have a home in Fernando’s heart.
‘Badass, Bipartisan Love’
Renee Folzenlogen’s essay from 2005 chronicled her arranged marriage by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church and her subsequent decision to get divorced. She asked herself whether she was brainwashed or whether everyone who marries is brainwashed to some degree. In this letter, she’s written about falling in love again and life’s winding path.
My Dearest Darling Renee (always address your younger self with affectionate salutations),
Today I am harvesting a massive golden sunflower from the community garden. Its bowed head is brimming with hundreds of seeds, overlooked by the goldfinch, quiet with promise. Nineteen years later, I want to say to you: You’re doing great, just slow down. Ask Dad to divulge the secrets of his mother’s Shanghai cooking, especially the 100-year-old dumpling recipe. Write it down, please.
Take the trip to Kansas with Mom; say thank you and hold her hand more often. Listen to your children (your 10-year-old was right: buy the Apple stock). Your kids keep getting wiser and more interesting.
Me? I’m doing well, thank you. Tim, whose love was a revelation, is still your partner, 22 years later. Together you’ll face floods, fights, cancer, a pandemic and a failed insurrection.
I know that sounds bad. Here’s the really bad part: saying goodbye to our parents and our sister, all within the span of seven months. As if they booked a trip without you and left you standing at the station, empty-handed. I wish I could spare you, but this is life, kiddo. You’ll have the sweet relief of not being able to stop the tears. You’ll write, paint and go to therapy. You’ll find your way to your neighbors, to the garden. There will be sunflowers in your future.
Remember when you thought the most radical thing about Mom and Dad was their mixed race, interfaith marriage? You got that one wrong. It was the six decades of Dolores and Wei Lim’s badass, bipartisan love, as precious in 2024 as an antique jewel, a real American modern love story. Remember that legacy, and keep your heart open.
‘I Wasn’t the Right Person to Write This Essay’
In her 2021 essay, Haili Blassingame’s identifies as solo polyamorous after a breakup prompted her to question the way society values monogamy. Here, she recognizes the difficulty of one person writing about an entire community.
Dear Haili,
You wrote this essay from a place of desperation. Needing the extra cash, you searched for paid writing opportunities, and found Modern Love. You wrote it in a week and submitted it, expecting nothing.
First came the email from Daniel Jones. Then the support from mostly women and queer folks, followed by the vitriol from men online. Then the gutting message from a member of the polyamorous community, who said you had mischaracterized solo polyamory when you suggested that solo polyamorous people weren’t seeking commitment, advancing painful assumptions that true commitment can only encompass monogamy.
It was a difficult message, but also an important and generous one. It’s true: You had made a mistake.
At the time, you needed to name yourself. You swung from label to label, lost in a limited vocabulary. I say this not with regret, but with hindsight: You weren’t the right person to write this essay. I don’t mean you were the wrong person to write your story, but you were the wrong person to define solo polyamory as someone struggling to define herself. The label offered a comforting shape to a nebulous feeling, but you were too quick to try it on.
You might’ve gotten it right had you grasped the gravity of being read by thousands of strangers, but it was your first publication.
Though I also want to challenge the burden specific to marginalized groups to get your story right, this responsibility of representation. You aren’t allowed the same grace to fumble because the stakes of getting it wrong operate on a different scale. It’s a trap: You have 1,500 words. You have one chance. Go.
Because there aren’t enough solo or Black poly stories receiving a platform, your voice was too loud. That email should’ve been its own essay with equal reach. A chorus will always result in a richer story.
The essay hangs framed in my bedroom. Recently, I looked at the illustration accompanying it — a Black girl reaching up to touch a pair of hands. Three years later, that girl is still reaching.
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