If You Want This Kind of Love, Don’t Expect It to Be Easy

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 she experienced after her divorce. Silcoff reflects on what it feels like to be a highly sexual person in her early 50s and tells us how being part of Gen X is central to her newfound freedom. For an upcoming episode about location sharing, the Modern Love team wants to hear your location-sharing story. Did something happen that made you regret sharing your location with someone? Was there a moment when you were thankful that you had? Where were you? What happened? How did your relationship change as a result? The deadline is May 1. Submission instructions are here. Here’s how to submit a Modern Love essay to The New York Times. Here’s how to submit a Tiny Love Story.

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 Modern Love essay about a novelist whose debilitating crush on a poet gives her a bad case of writer’s block (before leaving her with a badly broken heart). Limón also tells Anna why feeling anger and grief when we’re despairing can be the path to feeling more alive, and she explains why a pair of old sweatpants belong in a love poem as much as bees and flowers do. Ada Limón’s recent book, “You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World” can be found here. Lily King’s Modern Love essay, “An Empty Heart Is One That Can Be Filled” can be found here.

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 illness and the parts of his personality and creativity that remain. Plus, she talks about how helping Tim has shaped her, as a person, and a doctor. This episode is adapted from Jamie Shandro’s 2025 essay My Brother Has Schizophrenia. This Is How I Love Him. Here’s how to submit a Modern Love essay to The New York Times Here’s how to submit a Tiny Love Story

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, Peck talks about why country music uniquely captures our complicated feelings about love, and why love and pain are so often intertwined. He reads a Modern Love essay, “Strung Out on Love and Checked In for Treatment” by Rachel Yoder, about love addiction, and discusses what it takes to pull yourself from its distressing grip.

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 what you want often means changing your priorities and steering away from certain types of people. Today on the show, Rothwell reads Jasmine Browley’s Modern Love essay, “I Decentered Men. Decentering Desire for Men Is Harder,” about the challenges and joys of putting your own needs first. And Rothwell tells Anna Martin how vision boarding has helped her center herself. Here’s how to submit a Modern Love essay to The New York Times. Here’s how to submit a Tiny Love Story.