Whether you love it or love to hate it, Valentine’s Day is here. We thought we’d

Whether you love it or love to hate it, Valentine’s Day is here. We thought we’d celebrate this annual lovefest by showing how much we love “Modern Love,” the New York Times column on that complicated emotion we all know all too well.   In honor of our Evening with Modern Love event on March 20, we’re sending some love your way and naming our favorite stories from the column. See if one of your favorites made the list and don’t forget to join us on March 20 when the editor of the “Modern Love” column, Daniel Jones, and columnist Sara Eckel discuss their respective books, Love Illuminated: Exploring Life’s Most Mystifying Subject (With the Help of 50,000 Strangers) and It’s Not You: 27 (Wrong) Reasons You’re Single. “Friends Without Benefits,” Hannah Selinger - January 10, 2013 As a young 20-something that recently made the cross-country leap from California back to my Maryland roots, I found myself challenged by managing the expectations of where in life I thought I would be, and where I actually was. I felt like the epitome of Drew Barrymore’s character in Never Been Kissed and sought out love as a means to escape my personal disappointments of a first job gone wrong. In trying to give my everything to the person that I first loved, I lost myself – and when I let go, I was able to find my own spark. I learned to love myself, and for the first time was able to experience both internal and external love in a way that I hadn’t been able to before.      - Lisa “So Much in Common, in Name Only,” Milla Goldenberg - July 12, 2012 This is a story of great expectations, a story of girl meets boy, but before the boy and girl actually meet. The author thinks the fact that she and her suitor have the same last name is a sure sign they’re meant to be together. I love how the author takes you through her thought process building up to their actual meeting. She writes this story in her head, a “how we met” story so endearing, she’d never get sick of telling it to her friends and family and children and grandchildren. It’s a pattern we’re all familiar with, you write the end to your love story before the first chapter is even finished. It goes far beyond getting one’s hopes up and sets you up for even greater disappointment.       - Hannah “Sometimes, It’s Not You,” Sara Eckel - September 23, 2011 Sara’s frustrations with her lack of love life is something most women can relate to. She and her single friends try to rationalize what qualities married women have that they don’t. In musing about finding love, I always think about the expression “there’s a law school for everyone” (a favorite saying of my father’s). Some people are highly qualified: there’s the Harvards, the Yales, the Columbias; and then there are the truly terrible law schools - the bottom-of-the-barrel no-name ones where you wonder if you even need to take the LSAT to get in. But even those law schools have students and it’s just a matter of finding one that suits you.       - Text courtesy of Hannah, article recommendation courtesy of Jackie -- source link

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