Reading that just reduce me to a state of inarticulated aaaarghness.

Dear Modern Love,

I have a confession to make. My ex has this girlfriend who spends time at the house we share, and boy is she a piece of work. So I've been leaving stuff around to drive her crazy -- shoes, clothes, magazines with Uma Thurman on the cover (long story). It's kind of hilarious. Anyhoo, last week I cleaned the toilet with her toothbrush. Don't tell her, okay?

I bet you could get a rather funny, very short short story out of this scenario, the sort of short story where the ridiculousness of the characters would eventually generate some grand, whirling catastrophe of possessions.

Also, how about her touching believe that men are not passive-aggressive and don't understand passive-aggressiveness? I could invite her out here and introduce her around...

I think that Modern Love should do a series where they get different parties to a particular event to tell teh same story without telling everyone. I'd love to hear the boyfriend's version, the wife's and the wife's lover's. I wouldn't want to hear the wife's reaction to this column so much as her interpretation of the events.

That's a great idea. It would probably destroy the Modern Love column by bringing to the surface the cruelty and resentment that undergird it, but that might not be such a bad thing.

4. I think that Modern Love should do a series where they get different parties to a particular event to tell teh same story without telling everyone

Yes, the journalistic equivalent of the Jerry Springer Show. But then again I would want some prompting - I really would like to hear everyone's take on the "burgundy bra incident".

Men wage war in the open plains and deserts, donning full body armor, lugging lethal weapons.

Christ, this is like something out of a Victor Davis Hanson column.

I'm with the cat on this one: a piss on both their houses.

Men wage war in the open plains and deserts, donning full body armor, lugging lethal weapons

It seems to me the farther we get away from the reality of this, trash-talking instead of actual fisticuffs, very few educated people under the age of about forty who have actually done hard physical labor, the more people want to believe in an exaggerated, cartoonish version of their primal selves.

The Jetsons wouldn't have been into gadgetry, they'd have been into savagery.

That was the old me. This was going to be the new me. A stronger, cooler, nothing-fazes-me sort of girlfriend who would prove I've outgrown the formerly jealous me. I would be unconventional, brave, hip and oh-so-bohemian in my nonchalance.

Is this self-parody? I can't tell anymore.

I would say this is a new low for Modern Love, except unfortunately it's not.

I was rooting for all four of them to have a group sex binge to clear the air a bit. Would have been a good antidote to all the whiny self-important navel gazing that is the Modern Love trademark.

Also: note to self, never ever date a freelance writer from the NYC area.

9 is a brilliant point -- too brilliant to be italicized. It can only be referred to by its glorious number: 9.

Yes, let's all whistle past this graveyard.

What is more shaming, to the sort of person who comments about Modern Love on blogs, than to admit the limits of one's ability to be "unconventional, brave, hip and oh-so-bohemian in my nonchalance"?

than to admit the limits of one's ability to be "unconventional, brave, hip and oh-so-bohemian in my nonchalance"?

I think that most people here begin with the admission, and so find the original belief oddly adolescent.

Fuck that. I am Spartan in my nonchalance. Arrrgh.

Me, I'm oh-so-bohemian. Wheee!

Actually, Tim gets it exactly right in 15.

My brother was in a similar situation as the new boyfriend (except both new couples inhabited the house at the same time plus there was a kid involved, ~6yo).

I have a co-worker who's separated and dating someone new but still making dinner for her estranged husband who lives in the basement.

[/anecdotes!]

plus there was a kid involved, ~6yo

I actually think that if parents could be more adult about divorce, this kind of thing might be the best solution to custody arrangements.

15: Really? The flow of the river seems more self-congratulatory than that.

20: I always feel like the comments about ML columns are like the most annoying kind of drive-by blog comments. "You say this all works out fine, but I bet you'll be divorced in two years." "If you really loved your kid, you wouldn't write about him on the internet." Etc.

Which is why I tend to defend the ML columns and authors. The compulsion to judge people who write about personal things drives me crazy.

I think we should just talk about the new Harry Potter book. Anyone read it?

19: When I was young we had family friends --- two couples who were very close and in struggling marriages. They ended up swapping partners (divorcing and remarrying, I mean) and lived 3 or 4 blocks apart. All the kids had bedrooms in both houses, and went back and forth at will. Worked brilliantly for them.

Harry Potter wrote a book? Wait, who's Harry Potter?

but still making dinner for her estranged husband who lives in the basement

Awesome. I'm imagining a Kaspar Hauser-like figure, and saucers of gruel slid under the door.

never ever date a freelance writer from the NYC area

27: Wait, Ogged, are blogs or aren't they "reading"? Or is there some weird intellectual trick you're playing by which blogs are reading, but writing them isn't writing?

21, 22: Agreed. It would be nice if the Modern Love people could write about love like Sappho and John Donne combined, but a little humanity would do the New Blog Criticism a power of good.

21-22: are you projecting a bit from reactions to your own blog? For what it's worth, from what I've seen your tone is nothing like the typical Modern Love train wreck. You stand up for your choices and the other people in your life instead of whining about them. From the little I've seen, anyway.

30: Says you. *Lots* of people think I'm a big fat whiner.

Anyway, I don't think that (e.g.) this ML column is whiny. I think that the author's doing what they often do, which is writing something in which their *own* neuroses are treated more ruthlessly than anyone else's. (I think the woman who wrote about the fucking fake legal document she sent to her husband after she broke her foot on holiday was a rare exception.) I admire people who can write personal things that make themselves look bad.

27 is a good point. I once dated a writer who did do personal-type stories for a major regional paper. I appeared once under a pseudonym, and even the mild teasing in it scared the shit out of me. I realized she could totally screw up my life if she cared to.

But the worst was when she left me out of a "best kisses" V-day column soon after we broke up. Sour grapes, I rocked her world.

B, if someone is toolish enough to call himself a writer because he has a blog, you shouldn't date him either.

Nice little defensive move, there, snobby.

32: actually, when I think about it you have a point. But to draw a contrast with your writing, in your blog I always felt that although (yeah) you would sometimes whine about your life in general, you valued your relationships with your husband and kid more than your blog audience. You didn't seem to serve up stuff that made them look bad just to get a good story out of it. I often feel in ML that an ambitious writer is serving up other people in her life to a big public audience just to satisfy an exhibitionist or narcisstic urge. Even when a writer makes themselves look bad, they are still at the center of it. What's most modern about "Modern Love" is the general sense it gives off that the chance for public attention trumps private committments.

I guess I feel that a lot of the time these authors aren't writing about love at all, just themselves.

He is a philosopher, a whirlwind of ifs and thens, of rights and wrongs, an analytical vortex

I'm reminded of Laurence Durrell's comment on his brother Gerald's "My Family and Other Animals" - that to be lampooned in decent prose was one thing, but to be lampooned in bad English quite unacceptable.

And also that a "vortex" is one of those things you see when water's going down the plughole.

The compulsion to judge people who write about personal things drives me crazy.

So we're not supposed to make fun of losers now? As if.

They are writing about--exposing--themselves; that's what I admire. I think my restraint makes me a weaker writer--when push comes to shove, I value the privacy of my near and dear ones over the Truth. I was more honest before I knew half the people who read my blog, and before all the people I write about were reading it.

There's certainly a criticism to be made about whether or not it's "worth" sacrificing people's feelings if one isn't the next David Sedaris or Joan Didion. But I think that is an unfair standard: if one writes, one writes, and one should do the best one can.

Yeah, the lousy writing too. The exhibitionism is supposed to be justified by art, but lots of times the writing is horrible and there's not a lot of real self-awareness.

On the other hand, there's a weird thing where the worse the writing is, the more of a trashy reality-show voyeuristic thrill you get from reading it. Some kind of inverse relationship there.

when push comes to shove, I value the privacy of my near and dear ones over the Truth

See, that's a good thing. There is no Truth, but Mr. B and PK really do exist.

I don't think it's great writing, necessarily, but I really am willing to give people a pass for making themselves look worse than anyone else in the piece. Plus I figure ML is probably a training ground for working memoirists/essayists, so, hey, cool.

Honestly, the only reason I read the thing is b/c it gets linked here. But I feel pretty sure that it fulfills exactly what the editors want from it: a kind of voyeuristic god-those-smart-people-are-fucked-up thrill. Either the audience empathizes, and thinks "there but for the grace of god," or else they get to feel superior and think "I may have problems in love, but at least I'm not *that* crazy."

They are writing about--exposing--themselves

If you admire that, it's because of the criticism that you know will come. If you ban that criticism, if only by social convention, there's nothing to admire.

The problem with the ML column is the ML editor. The stories end where they should begin. The admission that she failed at her hipster boho attitude should be the start. We all know that was doomed. Tell us what comes next, after she realizes her life isn't heroic, but every bit as quotidian, stupid, and bougie as she no doubt once feared it would be.

>when push comes to shove, I value the privacy of my near and dear ones over the Truth.

Anyone who makes claims about Capital-T "Truth" should be mocked, and probably exiled.

The Truth is out there!

If you admire that, it's because of the criticism that you know will come.

No; it's because I like writing that's about people.

No one can be allowed to criticize anyone, because if they are, it will become permissible to criticize B.

Why can't someone at the Times inform Ms. Brunstein that "There are salt and pepper shakers that have come into the house over the years" is not a sentence with a passive voice construction in it? Personification, yes, but not passive voice.

AWB, are you trying to convince me I know nothing about grammar? Because you're succeeding.

"There are X." Not passive voice.

X= "salt and pepper shakers that have come into the house.....". A noun phrase.

"Salt and pepper shakers have come into the house." Perfective, not passive voice; the above sentence is a transformation of it.

"Salt and pepper shakers have been brought into the house". Passive sentence.

"There are salt and pepper shakers which have been brought into the house....." Derived from a passive sentence, but not itself a passive sentence.

Thank you.

AWB is correct. That's an expletive construction, not a passive.

"Salt and pepper shakers have been brought into the house". Passive sentence.

Yes, and that's what I read when I first saw the sentence. Perhaps it was originally passive and then someone changed it to say that the shakers had come into the house, possibly under their own power.

I think people now seem to imagine that obscuring agency is using the passive voice. The passive voice can obscure agency, as in "Mistakes were made," but it's not the only way to do it.

So, for example, we can say either "The Times and the Post have been corrupted" or "Corruption has been a major factor in the management of the Times and the Post", and the effect is the same. But to say "X has deliberately and knowingly corrupted the Times [or the Post]" would be a paranoid conspiracy theory.

Of course it would be, John. Letters of the alphabet are not capable of corrupting major big-city newspapers.

Or so the mullahs would have you believe.

You really shouldnt be surprised at the Faustian bargains people make in their lives.

Each person has to calculated what they value and live their life accordingly. Sometimes that involves compromises in marriage or divorce that others wouldnt be willing to make.

We could also say "'Corruption' is a tired liberal shibboleth, like 'accountability,' and like 'accountability' would be better abandoned to the muddy gutter of history with such rhetorical devices as 'It used to be about the music, man' and 'It's all about who you know'."

"Corruption" is a meaningful term when directed at people who are waiting for the media to finally do the right thing, and who are baffled at why it didn't happen sooner.

And yes, I think that the media is / are very significantly worse than they were 25 years ago. There has been a transformation.

52 is a perfectly good grammar point, but it was also the part of the essay that was the most resonant for me. My girlfriend confirmed that I utter many a sentence where the "I" seems baldly pasted over what would normally be a "we". The grammar of a marriage is not easily collapsed.

I haven't read the comments in this thread past about 10 or so, but there has been at least one response to seeing oneself in a Modern Love column.

My stomach flooded with acid. It was "Froky." Our most intimate pet word. Right there in black and white on the front page of Sunday Styles. I turned to the "Modern Love" section, and it hit me. My ex-boyfriend had gotten his first byline in the newspaper of record with an essay about me, him and our shared past.

Of course, my essay is not the truth. It's a version that is emotionally truthful for me ... The essay isn't about you or me, and wasn't written for either of us, but only about how people struggle with these things."

He had told his story, and his story had sold.

This guy looks like a contender for the Times' and Post's politics bureau. "Creative nonfiction" seems to be their methodology.

Letters of the alphabet are not capable of corrupting major big-city newspapers.

I am!

or should that be "I is"?

On the other hand, there's a weird thing where the worse the writing is, the more of a trashy reality-show voyeuristic thrill you get from reading it. Some kind of inverse relationship there.

Modern Love is reality TV for people who loudly proclaim that they don't own TVs.