Carrie Coon on What Being Worthy of Love Really Means

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From “The New York Times,” I’m Anna Martin. This is “Modern Love.” Every week, we bring you stories about love, lust, loss — and all the messiness of human relationships. This week, I’m talking to actor Carrie Coon.

Carrie Coon has kind of been everywhere lately. She’s in the new season of “The White Lotus,” which I’m very excited about. She’s on “The Gilded Age.”

But I’ve been wanting to talk to her about a movie she’s in called “His Three Daughters.” It’s about three sisters who’ve all reunited to take care of their dad, who’s on his deathbed. And Carrie Coon’s character is really worth talking about. Her name is Katie, and she sees herself as kind of a martyr, taking care of everything and everyone. She talks in these fiery, frustrated monologues.

Katie is constantly on a tirade. On the phone, angrily trying to get a DNR signed by a doctor, every time a home hospice worker stops by, she’s grilling him on the plan. And she relentlessly criticizes her stepsister, played by Natasha Lyonne, who she thinks is selfish and immature.

Coon’s character has such a rigid idea of who her sister is, that she can’t be bothered to find out what she actually thinks or feels. And it’s driving a bigger and bigger wedge between them. This whole movie feels so true to real life sibling and family relationships. It explores the ways we regress around our families, and how our ideas about each other can limit our relationships.

So today, Carrie Coon joins me to talk about the stories families tell themselves, and how those stories can make it harder to get to know and love each other. She reads a Modern Love essay by a woman who had to escape her mother’s ideas of her in order to find herself.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Carrie Coon, welcome to “Modern Love.”

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Carrie, I was so drawn in by your film, “His Three Daughters”— and not just because I am one of three daughters, although that made it interesting and very personally relevant.

Mm-hmm.

The sisters in this film are in a very sad and painful situation. Their father is dying, and they’ve come together to care for him in his final days. But they also treat each other in ways that can be so hard to watch.

Mm-hmm.

Their relationships are incredibly fraught. And you can sense that they’re entrenched in years of being in these roles in their family, years of putting each other in boxes. I will also say that it really seems like all three of the sisters feel deeply misunderstood by the others. Would you say that’s true?

Yes! Because they still see each other as they saw each other 20 years before. And you can debate how much growth has happened in the interim, but they’re not the same. And their story of what happened is different, in any family.

I have four siblings. Our perspectives on any event in our family, you will get five different interpretations of what was happening. And sometimes they match up a little bit, but sometimes they’re wildly —

Is there a specific thing coming to mind, where it’s like, I do not remember dad doing that? Is there one that you guys debate to this day?

Oh, there are lots of little details. I remember my dad disappearing for long periods of time — he was hiding from us —

Oh!

— and not knowing where he was. I think he had a secret space by our pond where he would hide.

Oh, you mean quite literally hiding. OK.

Yeah, I mean actually hiding. My mom worked nights, so she had a good excuse. She just slept all day, so she hid very openly. Dad had to steal his minutes away.

So there’s family lore about how often that happened, or where he was. And he was a great dad, actually. He took a lot of responsibility. But my sister, we joke. She has this trope about “remember family game night?”

[LAUGHS]:

And we’re all like, literally, there was never a family game night.

And you maintain there was no family game night?

No, definitely not.

OK. You’re connecting this experience of the film to your own family. And I do wonder, if what we’re seeing between the sisters and his three daughters kind of inevitably happens to some degree in all families, we can be very certain we know our family members very well that we don’t put the effort in to figuring out if we’re missing something fundamental about who they are in this moment. Does that resonate with you?

Absolutely. Because what I’ve come to understand — not only in making this movie and reflecting back on my own life — but because I’m now a mom. I have a six-year-old and a three-year-old. I work so hard not to project onto my children. It’s something I consciously am aware of.

What do you mean by that, projecting on your children?

I mean that I try not to presume who they are, or what they’re going to be, or what they’re thinking. So I put so much energy into it. I do not do that at all for my siblings.

No?

And so I’m trying to be such a good mom. I follow parenting experts and I’m trying not to make the same mistakes. And that is one fundamental thing that I’m incapable of doing. It’s our inability to be willing to see, again, the person who’s in front of us, rather than a set of ideas we have about that person.

I wonder, growing up, do you remember ever feeling like someone close to you had the wrong idea about you?

I mean, I didn’t have any idea about me. And some of the things that resonate in this essay have to do with in a family, when we’re fulfilling a role and when we are trying to be safe and loved, we start to define what love is through how we try to get it. And so for me, what I started to understand — for whatever reason, conscious or unconscious — that there was something about utility. That if I could make myself useful to the people around me, then they would have to love me. I have to be providing some use to these people — it’s utilitarian.

And so for me, as a woman, I was an observer of human behavior. And I was trying to keep myself, again, safe and useful in these spaces. We become shape-shifters, right? We start to turn ourselves into whatever the thing the person in front of us needs, and we become very good at it. I know a lot of women are going to recognize that behavior.

And what happens, of course, inevitably, is that you’re so hyper-compartmentalized, there’s absolutely no way that you are in touch with what you actually need. And so you become this amalgam of everyone else’s needs and feelings, and you’re metabolizing that all the time. And you get so far from the thing that you want.

And, of course, when you’re spending all your relationships guessing at that, but no one’s doing it for you because actually you’re constitutionally incapable of expressing your needs because you don’t believe anyone’s actually going to fulfill them for you, then all that does is it turns into a simmering resentment that, again, you are fundamentally incapable of communicating. And then it just explodes and falls apart. Or you hope it does, because that’s the only way you know how to get out of anything.

You’re talking about how it’s the stories we tell ourselves about the love we deserve, how we express love that are so formative. The author of the Modern Love essay you chose to read grew up being told a story by her mom, being told that she was cold and unloving. And for a long time, the author internalizes that and believes her mom must be right about who she is. Can you tell me a little bit about what drew you to this essay, or anything you want to say to set it up before we hear you read?

What resonated with me was an idea that I had about myself for a lot of years about how I was damaged, and that I was actually incapable of loving in the way that society expected me to.

Hm.

And now I understand that what I actually believed was that I didn’t have any self-worth. I was fundamentally unworthy of love. But actually what was going on is that I was just completely disassociated and compartmentalized. And you cannot love and believe yourself worthy of love from a place that’s not more integrated than that, because there’s no self there to —

Anchor you. Anchor you.

Yes, there’s nothing there. And I get more Buddhist as I age. I’m like, there is nothing there.

But this is different than that. There’s a distinction to be made about perception. But really what was happening is that I didn’t believe that A, my needs were worthy of being met. In fact, I couldn’t even tell you what they were.

That still, small voice inside of me did not exist. I couldn’t tell you what I needed. I was just an amalgam of other people’s needs.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

After the break, Carrie reads the Modern Love essay, “A Family Label Ungarbled,” by Harriet Brown.

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All right, Carrie, whenever you’re ready, take it away.

OK. “A Family Label Ungarbled, by Harriet Brown. When I was pregnant for the first time, my biggest fear was not whether I would love the baby, but whether I could — whether I was capable of loving another human being at all. I had good reason to think I wasn’t.

In her book, “Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins,” Elizabeth Stone describes how the stories families tell assign roles to each person, and how those roles can become self-fulfilling prophecies. In my family, I was the one incapable of love. I don’t know that anyone ever used such a phrase, but that’s the message I got as a young girl.

My mother used to bring out a black and white snapshot of my younger sister and me, side-by-side, when we were maybe two and five. She would point to the scowl on my face, comment on how my shoulders leaned away from my sisters, and say, “you were always like that.” Maybe all parents say things like this to their children — meaning to describe rather than to harm — but I came to believe it.

I grew up thinking of myself as ungracious, selfish, and cold, emotionally withholding — not just to the younger sister who adored me, but to my mother as well. I believed there was something wrong with me. I was missing some crucial element that other people had. I felt like the Tin Man in “The Wizard of Oz,” except no ticking clock could take the place of the heart I seemed to lack. It wasn’t just words that convinced me, it was the way I felt — or didn’t feel.

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Our house was full of drama — slammed doors, raised voices. I spent as much time as I could in my room, trying to block out the world with a book. But I knew that at some point after the shouting had subsided, that my bedroom door would bang open and my mother would launch herself onto the bed weeping. She would wrap her arms around my neck, tell me she loved me, and ask me to show her that I loved her, too.

Each time, my eyes stayed dry, my back rigid. I felt in those moments a terrible, unspeakable coldness. I was a stone in a frozen river, wedged into the bottom, buried deep in stillness and ice.

What kind of monster doesn’t love her mother?

I did feel something for my grandparents, but I wasn’t sure what to call it. My feelings for them were quiet and private. I felt a small, steady flame inside me when I was near them, but I didn’t think of it as love.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Love was big, and loud, and messy. Love rocked on the floor, head in hands, eyes running with mascara and angst. Love slammed doors and stalked out into the night — too wrought up to button its coat or brush its hair.

Love was not something you chose or wanted. Love rode you hard and tore you up. Love broke you.

By the time I left my parents’ house at 16, my inability to love was part of my repertory — like my green eyes and curly hair. I was flip about it, telling guys who were interested “you don’t want to get involved with me. I’ll only break your heart.” And I did.

My early relationships with men were more like car wrecks than mating rituals, tending toward longing, despair, and anguish. Once, I broke into a boyfriend’s apartment and stole back every gift I’d ever given him. I cheated on one boyfriend with another, and then again on the new one with the first. Many times I cried myself to sleep and woke up with mascara smeared across my cheeks.

That, I thought, was love. It made you miserable and stained your pillowcase. I treated men badly and let them treat me badly.

What did it matter? I was the damaged one, the one incapable of love. I deserved what I got, and anyone stupid enough to get near me deserved what he got.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

By the time my husband came along in my late 20s, my cavalier attitude had morphed into wistfulness. “You seem like a nice guy,” I said, one evening soon after we met. “Too nice. I’ll wind up hurting you. We should just be friends.”

“I am a nice guy,” he replied. “And what makes you think I want anything more than friendship?” “Just as long as we’re clear,” I said, and kept on saying it even after we started dating.

But our relationship was different. It was quiet, utterly devoid of torment. We took long walks around the city, and around his mother’s rural upstate enclave. We went to movies and shared Indian food. We rarely fought.

I liked who I was with him. “But it’s not love,” I told him. “I’m too selfish to really love anyone else.” He looked me in the eye. “I know who you are, and I know you are a good and loving person.”

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I married him, in part because I hoped he was right. I hoped he saw something in me I couldn’t see or feel, because I couldn’t reconcile his sense of me with my lifelong view of myself. This man had his own vision of me — what he wanted me to be. But I knew what was at my core. And while I knew that I felt something deep for him, I couldn’t give it a name, even to myself.

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Four years later, as I walked the halls of St. Vincent’s Hospital waiting for the Pitocin to take effect, I felt terror right through my bones. Sometime within the next 24 hours, I would give birth. And then I would finally know the truth about myself.

After three days without sleep and 14 hours of hard labor, I was too exhausted to know what I felt when my daughter was finally laid on my chest, her dark hair slick with blood. What I did know was that for the first time in my life, I wasn’t thinking about myself, about what kind of person I was — whether I was good or bad, lovable or not. That night, and in the many wakeful nights and days that followed, I was thinking first and nearly wholly about someone else.

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When my daughter cried, I felt it in my own chest — a vibrating fist of pain. When she slept or nursed or later laughed, I felt as if I stood in a halo of light. When it came to my emotional life with my husband, I could spend hours analyzing and rationalizing what I did or didn’t, should or shouldn’t feel for him.

Our moments of connection were often framed by my anxiety. By what a friend called, meaning no praise, my “nimble mind.” My efforts to make sense of our connection felt more like a rat running on a wheel than rational thought.

What I felt for my daughter bypassed the language center of my brain altogether. It was a jolt — an electric sizzle that connected my head to my heart. It wasn’t hearts and flowers. In fact, much of the time, it felt nearly unbearable, like blood starting to flow into a frozen extremity.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

My feelings for my daughter constricted my chest and kept me up nights worrying about whether she was getting enough to eat, to drink, whether she was happy, whether she was still breathing. Did I love her? The word seemed puny in the face of such an intense and fundamental sense of connection with another human being.

I realized that part of the issue for me was semantic. I’d come to associate the word “love” with feelings of pain and despair. But this connection we had, this bond, this was a whole new experience. For weeks, I did not, could not name it. And then one day, the word slid out of my mouth as my daughter cried on the changing table.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

“I love you. Yes, I do.” I said, patting her dry, fastening the Velcro strips on her diaper cover. And for the first time in my life, I believed it.

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We use the word easily now, all of us. My older daughter, now 19, says I love you at the end of each of our phone calls, even brief logistical chats. My 14-year-old says it every night, no matter how irritated she is with her clueless parents. Now that I’ve come to think of myself as capable of both giving and receiving love, I can feel that jolt sometimes with my husband, as well as my daughters.

And I can look back on my childhood with different eyes, too. One day, not long ago, I came across that black and white photograph of my sister and me — the one where I’m scowling and leaning away. I’d seen it many times, but had never really looked at it, afraid I would see the monster I always imagined myself to be.

This time I made myself look at the plastic Barrette holding back my bangs, my spindly five-year-old arms. It occurred to me for the first time that maybe I wasn’t scowling. Maybe I was squinting into the sun. I looked at the way my body leaned away from my sister’s and wondered if I was leaning toward someone who was standing outside the frame — my grandmother, say.

A whole new story unspooled in my head.

I was five. The sun was in my eyes.

I was tired or hungry, and I wanted to run to my grandmother because I wanted to feel that steady, small flame inside me. I wanted to feel the thing I grew up believing I could not feel. It seemed at least as likely as the story I had believed for so many years.”

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When we come back, Carrie Coon on how her grandmother helped her learn how to love.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Carrie, thank you so much. What are your immediate thoughts, immediate feelings?

Oh, I’d forgotten from the first time I read it that that piece about the grandparents is actually so critical. I grew up in a house. I had five siblings, like I said. My parents both worked full time. My dad ran our family auto parts store, and my mom was an emergency room nurse who worked at night and slept all day. And so she didn’t take us anywhere, and I babysat my brothers every weekend.

But my maternal grandparents — who had been in a terrible car accident in their 50s — they survived, but it forced them both into retirement. So they were just wholly available to us our entire lives. And my mother was a good nurse, and I think sometimes it got the best of her. But she was also depressed. She had really terrible postpartum depression with both boys.

And my grandmother would come over and say, “I’m taking the kids.” And she would take us to their house, and we would spend the night there. That’s where I first started watching movies. I watched all the classic black and white movies with my grandfather. We would eat popcorn and drink soda and stay up too late.

They were such a source of steadiness, constancy and love, really effusive love. Because my family was a bit classic Midwestern withholding. We didn’t say “I love you” a lot, and we didn’t hug. But that love of my grandparents I know sustained all of us. Not because my parents did anything wrong, just that my grandparents did something really right.

Can you tell me a bit more what being at your grandparents’ house felt like for you as a kid? You’d leave your home. I don’t know if you got in a car. How did you get there, and what did it feel like as you were heading there and once you arrived? Tell me what it felt like in your body.

Oh, that’s such an interesting question. They lived only a mile away, and so the drive was short. And so once they grabbed you, you knew you’d be there soon. And there was no complication.

My sister was adopted from El Salvador. She’s a year and a half older than me. She came into this country at age four not speaking the language. I finally had a sister, not my big brother who could really push my buttons.

I felt a tremendous amount of responsibility for her. And I think, because I believed that my grandmother, our needs would be met by her, that I got to drop some of that responsibility when I was with them. I didn’t feel the same level of responsibility for her. I was a bit of a parentified daughter in that way.

And I guess, now that you say it, there was a bit of, probably, shoulder drop and a relief just to be there. And I even though I didn’t express my needs openly, my grandmother was someone who would intuit your needs. And that continued all the way through even when I was in high school.

I was a very involved high school student. And my grandmother would do things like she knew my mom wasn’t going to take me shopping. She’s not a shopper. And she would go to Dillard’s and buy me 10 little black dresses and bring them to the house and say, “homecoming is next week. Let’s try these on.”

Wow.

“Let’s pick the one you like and I’ll take the rest back,” which that’s a tremendous level of care.

It really is.

Especially when you’re dealing with the morass that is being a teenager, to have somebody actually — and she had really good taste!

I was gonna say, did you like the dresses?

She had incredible, impeccable taste.

Oh, my god.

I’m a bit laundry-obsessed, because my grandmother taught me to buy beautiful things, whether first or second hand, and just take really good care of them. Like, quality was more important than quantity, you know? And so whenever I get a stain out of a sweater, I think about my grandmother.

It’s a way of telling her that you love her. Yeah. Getting the Tide pen out is a way of saying — yeah. I mean, what you’re talking about, this sort of — we spoke earlier how your understanding of love, at least in your parents’ home and your own home growing up, was I need to be of utility.

And then when you go to your grandparents’ house, you get to drop that. You don’t need to be useful. You don’t need to be the sort of parental figure. You can just exist. You can just be a kid. That must have been so freeing.

Yes. Yes, it was. Yeah, I felt really safe there. And that relationship continued with her well into my 20s. Because she was the first person, when I was serial overlapping in relationships, to the point of my detriment —

Serial overlapping means cheating?

I had multiple boyfriends at the same time, yes. And at one point in my life in college, I was dating two guys who didn’t know, and it had been going on a long time. And my entire dormitory was conspiring to help me, because it was very enrolling using that charisma for good.

I think marveling at what I was able to pull off was pretty complex.

The fact that had your whole dorm on your side is also remarkable.

Yes. Yes, it was pretty intense. And my roommate, certainly, I mean, a little bit. But it got really stressful, and so I studied abroad. I signed up to study abroad, and I left the country.

Wow.

That was my way of dealing. That was how incapable I was.

Wait, sorry, your grandma knew about these two relationships? You were confiding in her?

Well, yeah, because I came back clearheaded enough to be, like, I need to end both of these, and I need to fast. I’m Catholic, so I was like, I have to punish myself. Right? And I think my family recognized that I was punishing myself.

And my grandmother was worried about my well-being, rightly so. And she wrote me this incredible letter. I think it was before I came back from studying abroad.

And she just said, “look, I see you. I see what you’re doing. And I want you to know that pity is not the same as love. And you are not dignifying those people by withholding information from them, because you are not letting them make a choice.”

And what I didn’t realize at the time is that I was also not allowing anyone the credit. I didn’t believe anybody could handle what I had. And I didn’t believe in anyone’s capacity — which is fundamentally not generous and very egocentric. And that was the thing she was calling out. Now, it took me a long time to actually learn that lesson that she was giving me.

Your grandma sounds incredibly insightful, and incisive, and compassionate, and intuitive in this way that is remarkable. I mean, to write that letter and to basically tell you to knock it off, but in the most beautiful way, in a way that shows her deep knowledge of and what you’re struggling with, is just so powerful. It’s so remarkable. You said it took you many years to internalize that lesson that she gave you in that letter. When did you start to feel things start to click, start to shift in you?

When I met my husband.

Mm.

We clocked each other immediately. We were both in other relationships when we met.

The Oregon story. I would love to hear the Oregon story.

OK, OK. So I finally got cast in the main stage at Steppenwolf, a very coveted role in the play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” Boozy marriage play — not where you think you’re going to meet your life partner. And Tracy’s 15 years older than me.

Tracy Letts.

And I was in a relationship with, I will say, lovingly, with someone who was going to hold me accountable for some of my behavior. And I got into that relationship knowing that that person was offering me that. And I was pretty unmoored at the time, and I needed someone who was going to put me in my place a little bit.

And so I made that choice. And he was in a relationship that was kind of running its course. They were kind of at the point where they had to decide whether they had a future or not.

And we also sort of recognized, I think you’re a person who leaves the door open as an escape hatch. We saw the escape. You can sense an escape hatch if you’re someone who’s got one. And we started our flirtation.

But what I very quickly started to understand, partly because he was 15 years older than me, was that there was nothing I had that he had not seen or couldn’t handle or couldn’t hold. And I understood that this person, any truth I could say out loud and there was nothing that would scare him. And so it was really that belief in him that then led me to realize that I had never actually believed that about anyone — rightly or wrongly.

How did your understanding of yourself change once you’ve found that love with Tracy that you’re describing? How did it change how you understood love?

That I was worthy of it. That somebody saw all of me, flaws and all, including the way I was conducting myself in the world, and saw that that actually wasn’t me. That there was actually more there, and that I was not my behavior.

And I was not immoral. And I was not damaged. I was just living out some patterns of behavior that were not actually me. And he saw it. And so I didn’t have to do it anymore, immediately.

And when my parents met him for the first time, to their credit, they said, “this is the first time you have actually been yourself, that I have not seen you change before my eyes.” Which also gave me a little clue that they saw me, too, which I had never believed — maybe.

Did your grandma meet Tracy?

No. She passed away before we got together. And they both love to bet on horses, so I’m really sad about it. They would have really just loved all the big races. But no, she never got to see me meet my partner in real time.

In a way, though, Carrie, as you’re articulating this transformation and your understanding of someone who can express love, who deserves it, what that means to you, she did not meet Tracy in this world. But all of the work she put into loving you prepared you to be the kind of person who could be in love with Tracy and accept love from Tracy.

No question. She planted so many seeds.

In a way, I do feel like they’ve met.

I didn’t know this was going to become about my grandma D, but I am so glad.

I am so glad, too! Grandma D, I was going to say, I would love to put a name to this character that I now see as the wisest woman in the world — Grandma D. Grandma D.

Yeah, Darlene. She was a science teacher.

Do you have that letter that she sent you in college?

I do.

[GASPS]:

I absolutely do. I have it. It was so important to me. Nobody was speaking the truth to me. You don’t feel seen when people aren’t holding you accountable.

Yeah, leveling with you. Absolutely.

It’s like, oh, you don’t really care about the damage I’m doing running roughshod on the world, and nobody notices. You don’t feel your [INAUDIBLE].

Do you return to the letter — and then I will move on from the letter — but do you return? Do you read it with some frequency?

I think about that. That was the phrase that stood out the most as fundamentally true about love. The pity is not the same as love is a really important lesson for young women, because our feelings of guilt are confusing. What we think of as guilt is not guilt. It’s often just you’ve gotten so habituated to metabolizing other people’s feelings.

And so it’s boundarylessness. You don’t have any boundaries. And what my grandmother was really getting at, I think, was boundaries, which I did not have.

And I want my daughter and my son to have very clear boundaries so that they’re able to say, those are your feelings, actually. Those aren’t my feelings. And I’m going to go ahead and give those feelings back to you so you can deal with them. Because I don’t want them to apologize for their needs. I want them to be able to articulate their needs and know that sometimes their needs are going to inconvenience other people, make people uncomfortable. And that you can do that respectfully, compassionately, and still return those feelings to people for them to deal with. That’s what I want them to be able to do.

You’re really taking us through the evolution from young Carrie to Carrie now, your understanding of what it means to love. It’s incredible to chart this territory with you. And looking back over this territory that we’ve traversed, I’m going to ask you a big question. I know you can handle it.

[GASPS]:

Is love something we know inherently, or is it something we learn along the way, or is it some combination of both? What do you think?

Oh, I think it’s a combination.

It has to be, right?

Only because so often we’re just so unknown to ourselves. And sometimes it takes a long time to dig through all those patterns of behavior and find the person who’s in there. And again, maybe there is no person in there. I’m willing to stay open to that possibility.

But maybe the thing we learn the most is how we really don’t have to take things personally. That everybody’s acting out of patterns of behavior, and you have to be big enough to give them the space and the grace to be on that journey. Just holding space for other people, which my husband did for me. He recognized that there was a lot of growing yet to do, but that he I was worth investing in.

Carrie Coon, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Thank you, Anna. I really appreciate it.

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This episode of “Modern Love” was produced by Reva Goldberg, and Davis Lande. It was edited by Gianna Palmer and Jen Poyant. Production management by Kristina Josa. The “Modern Love” theme music is by Dan Powell. Original music in this episode by Marion Lozano, Pat McCusker, Rowan Niemisto, and Dan Powell.

This episode was mixed by Daniel Ramirez. Studio support from Maddie Masiello and Nick Pittman. Special thanks to Robert Kessler, Mahima Chablani, Nell Gallogly, Jeffrey Miranda, and Paula Szuchman.

The “Modern Love” column is edited by Daniel Jones. Miya Lee is the editor of Modern Love Projects. If you want to submit an essay or a tiny love story to “The New York Times,” we’ve got the instructions in our show notes. I’m Anna Martin. Thanks for listening.

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