Often people with a love story write about three things; finding love, losing love and trying to keep love alive, Modern Love column editor Daniel Jones says. (file image) Photo: Unsplash/ Kristina Litvjak
Daniel Jones never dreamed he'd still be doing a New York Times column about love two decades and 200,000 submissions later. Or that the Modern Love column would have grown to include a podcast, books, live shows and TV shows in four countries.
Each week, he talks to strangers about their relationships - romantic, platonic and familial - and publishes their stories to millions of readers.
So what has Jones learned over the years about life and love?
His team gets about 10,000 submissions a year and often they fall into three categories; finding love, losing love and trying to keep love alive.
Trying to find love
New York Times' Modern Love column editor Daniel Jones. Photo: Supplied / Phoebe Jones
One of the most popular articles, opened by more than 75 million people, was called The 36 Questions That Lead To Love, based on psychologist Arthur Aron's experiment to hasten the process of falling in love by asking increasingly intimate questions to your date and then staring into each other's eyes for four minutes.
"When people get to know each other, they're off on a first date, it's so hard to balance vulnerability," Jones tells Nine to Noon.
"But to have almost a game where you're asking each other questions and they're questions like 'what's your best memory from childhood? What's your most terrible memory from childhood? What's your relationship with your mother like?'
"They're questions that led to storytelling and memory and what was meaningful in your life. Even if you don't fall in romantic love with someone by going through this process, you do get to know someone on a deep level and have empathy for them."
Love is more like a basketball than a vase, another submitter wrote. This man wanted a "peaceful" relationship without any arguments after he and his fiancé had both experienced a troubled childhood, but he realised after they broke up that love needs to be enduring and conflict can deepen relationships when resolved.
Trying to keep love alive
Another sensational article, published in 2006, was from a woman who used exotic animal training techniques on her husband in a bid to improve their relationship.
"A lot of it was common sense stuff ... which is just people don't really change by nagging, they don't change by being sarcastic with them, and neither do animals, animals probably don't even understand sarcasm. But they do understand encouragement, treats and rewards, and a lot of her technique that she used with her husband simply had to do with ignoring bad behaviour … and you encourage the good behaviour … by overpraising them and offering treats.
"I think we could all stand to benefit from focusing on the positive things people do and encouraging that rather than harping on the negative things that annoy us."
Losing love
Relationships don't have to last to be good, Jones says. A woman struggling with end of a relationship asked her therapist how to forget her ex-partner.
"It's not about forgetting; it's about being grateful for a relationship that gave you something.
"I think part of the message there is we seem to embrace scripts for our life. We think a marriage needs to last until death in order to be a successful marriage … It's just a matter of perspective, of looking at in different ways.
"There is something liberating about that and not feeling the 'should's … the 'should have lasted longer', 'should have been lifelong', and accepting it and being grateful for what it was."
Many have a fear of losing a loved one, but "things are beautiful because they are fleeting", another woman, whose boyfriend died by suicide, wrote. She found this closure whilst working at a flower shop and seeing people pick them to mark special occasions.
"If something lasts forever, there's a lack of meaning in that, there's a lack of appreciation for that, because value is based on sort of scarcity," Jones says.
One of the "most moving, sad essays" to be published in the column was by children's book author Amy Krouse Rosenthal, 10 days before she died. She penned a moving love letter, lauding her husband's charms, in the hopes that he can move on and find love again.
"It was such a moving essay, it made people cry all around the world, and such an act of generosity that I think is a good lesson for a lot of people … the generosity of that impulse was just so admirable."
In the past few years, Jones has been on his own journey of learning about relationships, with his marriage ending "amicably but hard nevertheless" and his father dying earlier this year.
"I started going through a lot of the circumstances that a lot of the people had been writing for the column, for all this time, had been going through.
"It's connected me to my work in a new way and to the people who have shared their stories so generously with me. I feel closer to them."
