Latest news with #ModernLove
New York Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Modern Love' Podcast: First Love Mixtape: Side A (Encore)
'I kissed him for the entire B side of R.E.M.'s 'Reckoning.' I kissed him so much I went home that night with red, swollen lips. I don't think I ever experienced a physical sensation better than that burn.' This episode of 'Modern Love' features Lisa Selin Davis's essay 'What Lou Reed Taught Me About Love.' She writes about how the song 'I'll Be Your Mirror' became the soundtrack to her summer romance with a floppy-haired 'rocker kid' who inadvertently helped her find healing. Then, we hear from some members of the 'Modern Love' team about the songs that influenced them as teenagers and about the memories — funny, empowering, nostalgic — that they carry with them. Stay tuned for next week's episode, where we'll hear from our listeners about the songs that taught them about love. Here's how to submit a Modern Love essay to The New York Times. Here's how to submit a Tiny Love Story.
New York Times
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Modern Love' Podcast: Friends for 16 Years. Lovers for One Night.
'I just thought that we had time. I just thought we had forever to work it out.' Elizabeth and Jeff were best friends. They did everything together, from early-morning runs to late-night karaoke sessions. They came up with secret code names for each other and went on undercover missions in their neighborhood. They fought, and made up, and fought some more. Beneath their playful dynamic, an attraction was growing between them, but Elizabeth never wanted to risk the friendship by exploring it. Then Jeff got sick, and things changed. In this episode, the story of a once-in-a-lifetime friendship, from the very beginning to the very end. This episode is adapted from Elizabeth Laura Nelson's 2025 essay Friends for 16 Years. Lovers for One Night. Here's how to submit a Modern Love essay to The New York Times. Here's how to submit a Tiny Love Story.
New York Times
20-05-2025
- General
- New York Times
Why Boys and Men Are Floundering, According to the Relationship Therapist Terry Real
A session with Terry Real can be uncomfortable. The marriage and family therapist is known to mirror and amplify the feelings of his clients — sometimes cursing and nearly yelling — in an attempt to get men in touch with emotions they're not used to expressing. Real says men are often pushed to shut off their expression of vulnerability when they are young. That process, he says, can lead to myriad problems in their future relationships. Real recently joined Anna Martin, host of the Modern Love podcast, to discuss his work, why he thinks our current models of masculinity are broken and what it will take to build new ones. You can listen to their conversation by clicking the 'Play' button below, or by following the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. If you prefer to read their conversation, you'll find an edited transcript below. Note: The podcast episode included profanity that has been edited from the transcript. Anna Martin: Terry's been a therapist for more than 40 years. He calls his approach 'relational life therapy,' and he's written several best-selling books about it. And that whole time, he's kept a particular focus on men because for Terry, the things he sees men struggle with — from the most mild problems to the most extreme behaviors — it all stems from something fundamentally broken about the way our culture defines masculinity. So today, Terry Real tells me what he's learned about masculinity that drove him to break the rules of therapy. He'll tell me how his own childhood showed him that our current models of masculinity don't work, and what it will take to build new ones. And during our conversation, we talked a lot about what it means to be a man right now. Because to Terry, despite his 40 years with hundreds, if not thousands, of clients, he says his mission of reaching men has never felt more urgent. Terry Real, welcome to 'Modern Love.' Terry Real: Thank you. It's wonderful to be here. Anna Martin: Terry, you are, I think it's fair to say, an institution in your industry. You've been a marriage and family therapist for how long? For 40 years? Terry Real: Yeah. Anna Martin: What's the exact number? Is it 40 exactly? Terry Real: Forty-two. About two years more than my marriage. Anna Martin: OK, let's not round down. Let's say you've been a marriage and family therapist for 42 years. How do couples end up in front of you? I have to be honest. I don't really feel like a guy would be calling you up and being like, Hi, I need help with my marriage. So how do people end up in your office? Terry Real: Yeah. I like to say, my books appear under pillows all over America. Here, honey. If you want a little action tonight, read this book. So, yeah. No, a lot of the men that I see are what I call 'wife-mandated referrals.' And I don't mean to be marginalizing same-sex marriages. But the men I see — here's a quote from Terry Real: 'Shame-based people have pain. Grandiose-based people have trouble.' They're not in pain. The people around them are in pain. And they come to see me when the trouble gets so great that either the people around them are dragging their butts in to see me, or the crisis has opened up and they're desperately trying to save their relationship. That's mostly how it goes. Anna Martin: And as I know from reading your work, shame-based people in a relationship are often women in a relationship, and then the grandiose-based people are often men. Is that right? Terry Real: Often. Here's maybe a more nuanced take. And this, too, is a broad generality, so take it with a grain of salt. But women in our culture — it's changing with feminism, but traditionally, women in our culture lead from the one-down, accommodating, shame position and have covert grandiosity, whereas men lead from the one-up, superior position and have covert shame. And with women, if they're depressed, they're depressed. With men, if they're depressed — no, they're not. They're drinking. Anna Martin: They stuff it down. Yeah. Terry Real: Yeah. And you don't see the pain. You see the flight into medication or grandiosity that avoids the pain. And so, many of the difficulties we think of as 'typically male'— the substance abuse, rage, affairs — I'm not saying all of them are fueled by depression, but many of them are. And underneath the depression is trauma. And the way we traditionally 'turn boys into men' is we teach them to disconnect — disconnect from vulnerability, disconnect from their feelings, disconnect from others. Anna Martin: The toxic individualism, yeah. Terry Real: Yeah, we call that learning to be independent. And the consequence of a disconnected boy is a disconnected man. We're not invulnerable. Anna Martin: Right. Terry Real: We're human. I tell the guys I work with, pretending to escape your own vulnerability is like trying to outrun your rectum. It's — Anna Martin: [LAUGHS] I actually read that line in your book, and I was hoping you'd say it out loud, because it's just too good. Yeah. 'Outrun your rectum.' Perfect. Put that on a shirt. Terry Real: Of course, we're all vulnerable. But trying to live up to that superhuman code, that leaves every man vulnerable to anxiety and shame that they then don't admit because that would be weak. So the whole thing is just a mess. And the work I do, I say I feel like a surgeon reattaching nerves. Anna Martin: You write about that process in, I think it's your first book, which was about male depression. That book is really fascinating. You write how male depression, as you describe it, often comes from these unacknowledged feelings and is often the root cause of many problems in marriages and families. I want to talk more about that. But first, I want to know more about why you decided to focus a lot of your practice on working with men specifically. And just to start at the beginning, when you were growing up, what did you think it meant to be a man? Terry Real: I thought what it meant to be a man was to be raging and dominating and abusive like my father. And I wanted no part of it. My father used to beat me. I mean, you piss my father off, and he'd get out a pretty thick belt and whack the [expletive] out of you. And one of the things I'd realized 30 years after the fact was, unfortunately, my vulnerability or sensitivity was a trigger for my father. If he saw me being vulnerable or sensitive, he would go into a rage, just when I needed him most. But he was very contemptuous of weakness and vulnerability. So he would never talk about his childhood. I knew it was very difficult. He lost his mother when he was 8. His father and he and his brother lived through the Depression in America. His father was the black sheep of the family, couldn't find work. They moved in with another relative. The relative was mean to my dad. And I got my dad to tell me — gosh, I was close to 30 — that when he was, what, 11-ish, his father brought him and his younger brother into the garage and turned on the car and told them to go to sleep. And my father knew that there was something wrong. And he went back and forth with his dad and finally physically fought him. And he says his shoe cracked the window, and he and his brother got out. And then he was banished the next day. Anna Martin: When he told you this story, did that change anything about how you saw your father? Did it shift something in your understanding? Did it make you understand something about him? Terry Real: Yes, of course. It softened my heart. And I felt bad for him. And I understood immediately. And he said, 'My father was a passive man. My father was a weak man.' Anna Martin: Your father said that about his father? Terry Real: That's right. And so he became the 'anti-that' and the 'anti-that' was the macho [expletive]. But I could understand why he would be contemptuous of what he deemed as weakness. Anna Martin: Because it reminded him of his own father? Terry Real: Because his father's weakness threatened to kill him. It was murderous. Anna Martin: The way that you opened up space, as it were, encouraged your father to share, was that the beginnings of Terry Real's approach to therapy with men? Like, did you seed anything in that conversation that we now see in your practice today? Terry Real: Yeah, that's a beautiful question. We don't have to go into a lot of detail, but for two years, Belinda and I and my kids, and — Anna Martin: Belinda's your wife, yeah. Terry Real: Yeah, she's a great family therapist in her own right, I want to say. We were followed by a documentarian, and there's a docuseries that's coming out about us. And in one of the beginning scenes — astoundingly enough, I was 34 years old, not married yet to Belinda — and my parents came for a week of family therapy with me. Anna Martin: Wow. Whoa. Terry Real: And we filmed it. And the film survived. And what you see in it — I haven't seen it for 40 years. Anna Martin: Wait, was someone doing family therapy on you, your mom and your dad? Or were you doing family therapy on the three of you? Terry Real: No, someone was doing family therapy with us. Anna Martin: Gotcha. Terry Real: And what you see is, after 10 minutes, I sidelined the therapist, who's pretty irrelevant, actually. And I move in to my dad and mom. Anna Martin: Whoa. Terry Real: And I am doing relational life therapy with my parents at 34. You see it. Anna Martin: What are you seeing yourself doing? Terry Real: Well, one of the core principles of R.L.T. is what we call 'joining through the truth': confronting people, but in a way that's precise and loving, so that they can hear it. One of the things that therapy school says about grandiose people in general, and men in particular, is 'don't tell truth to power.' I believe my field colludes with patriarchy and protecting perpetrators. We have done a great job of helping people for 50 years come up from shame. But we've been ridiculously ineffective at helping people come down from grandiosity. And I knew that I had to do that. So there was a moment with my dad, he started crying. I get — oh, forgive me. He talked about his mother, who died. He talked about his exile. And he started crying. And he said, I haven't felt any of this. I haven't thought about this my whole life until you started probing, Terry. And as he was crying, I put my hand on his shoulder. And I said, You cry, old man. Every tear you cry is a tear I don't have to. That was pretty wise at 34. [EXHALES] Anna Martin: Watching yourself say those words, now, 30 years later — Terry Real: Yes. Anna Martin: — do they have new meaning to you? Terry Real: Yes. Anna Martin: Can you tell me about that? Terry Real: Here's my most famous quote. It's the height of pretension to quote yourself, but I will. Anna Martin: You can do it. Terry Real: Thank you. 'Family pathology rolls from generation to generation like a fire in the woods, taking down everything in its path, until one person in one generation has the courage to turn and face the flames. That person brings peace to their ancestors and spares the children to follow.' Anna Martin: And you were doing that in this moment. You were facing the flames, or your father was facing the flames, or both of you were. Terry Real: We both were. It was a rare moment. We both were. Anna Martin: That's a remarkable scene you just shared. And I really appreciate you telling us about it. It is remarkable. I mean, you say it's wise for 34. This is the beginning of your practice. You were just starting to develop this approach to working with men. And I find it pretty remarkable that one of the first men you practiced this on, or did this with, rather, was your own father. That feels apt and healing and quite difficult. Terry Real: Apt and healing and difficult. I'll tell you this. I am the son of a depressed, angry father. He was the son of a depressed, angry father. I have two boys, 35, 37. Neither of them say that, and neither will their children. And that is the greatest accomplishment of my life. Anna Martin: Can I ask you, Terry, as you developed and honed in on this relational approach to therapy and developed this focus — is it right to call the focus on men a specialty? Is it right to call it a focus? Terry Real: Sure. I consider myself a relationship expert and an expert on male psychology. Anna Martin: As you developed this focus on male psychology — you've talked a bit about the larger therapeutic community, but how did your colleagues respond? I feel like it's — just speaking for me, I feel like it's easy to look at men, especially white men, and say, comparatively, this group of people has way more privilege, as you've noted, than other groups in society. So did anyone say — did you ever get pushback on that focus, that — I don't know — privileging, as it were, of that experience? Terry Real: Am I mansplaining? Anna Martin: No, I more so just mean, like, did anyone say, Why focus on this group of people who already has so much power? Although what I'm hearing you say is, because this group of people has so much power, that's why I'm interested in focusing on them. Terry Real: Well, yes and no. I mean, power, yes. Miserableness, also. I think one of the revolutionary things I said — and I really want to give a shout out to some beautiful early feminist psychologists, the folks at the Stone Center, Jean Baker Miller, but most of all, Carol Gilligan, my dear friend, who are man-loving feminists. I was really, and to some degree, am, one of the few male voices saying patriarchy is a system that does damage to everybody. Yes, men are on top, and women are on the bottom, but aye-yai-yai-yai-yai if that's your idea of what's on the top. Not to whatever, but there was a — I won't say who, but there was an expert on TV talking about aspirational masculinity and how all these young men are looking at Elon Musk. Yeah, sure, richest man in the world. Send people to Mars, fantastic. You want to be married to that guy? Most people don't. And — Anna Martin: [LAUGHS] Terry Real: — if that's what you want to aspire to, I don't want to get too close to you. Anna Martin: Huh. Well, you're bringing up something that I wanted to ask you about. I'm really curious about your perspective on what masculinity means right now. We talked about your early understandings of it. And this is a concept, certainly, I feel human society has wrestled with since maybe the dawn of human society. It does feel to me, though, that we are at a kind of flashpoint, culturally, at least, in the United States, where men who hold on to traditional values of masculinity are lashing out. They're reasserting those values. They're ascending to power in some cases. What are you seeing? In the year 2025, what is going on with men? Big question, Terry, but I feel like you're the person to ask this to. Terry Real: Not to be grandiose myself, but I want to take ownership. I am the person to ask this to, and I'll tell you why. There are no models. There are no models of healthy, relational masculinity. Anna Martin: None? Terry Real: Yeah. And boys and men are floundering. Everybody knows that. But look, someone described my work as 'women have had a revolution, and now men have to deal with it.' The response to the challenge that women are presenting to men in their marriages, in the job market, in education, has largely been blowback — a resurgence of the most traditional and, frankly, unappealing aspects of traditional patriarchy. Just dominance and bullying. And that ain't it. And so I don't want women to stand down from their demands. I want men to stand up and meet them. What women are asking for from men is relationality, is learning to be intimate, is opening up your heart and sharing your feelings, being vulnerable, being soft when your partner is vulnerable, being responsible. These are all wonderful things for guys. Stop whining, and let me teach you how to do it. And the conundrum for men is what you learned about what it means to be a strong man as a boy guarantees you'll be seen as a lousy husband as a man. You cannot be invulnerable and intimate at the same time. So when I help men move into open-heartedness, connection, the expression of feeling, compassion, responsibility, giving, I am explicitly reconfiguring masculinity with them. Anna Martin: I mean, you're talking about these models of masculinity, and I'm thinking about the models that are out there right now, especially ascendant ones that are very different from what you're laying out. I'm thinking specifically about the 'manosphere,' as it's called. These are podcasts, YouTube channels, online forums, influencers that are really pushing traditional masculinity. Do you ever see that kind of stuff? And what do you feel when you do see it? Terry Real: You want my mature, therapeutic self, or you want my New Jersey self? Anna Martin: You can give me your New Jersey self. Terry Real: I want to throttle them. Anna Martin: [LAUGHS] And what would the therapeutic self say? Terry Real: People with simple ideas will not have a hard time getting an audience. But these are carnival barkers who are leading our young men down the path of suicide. You know the TV show 'Adolescence,' right? Anna Martin: Yeah, it's big right now. Terry Real: And all the press it got? You cannot reassert your masculinity through dominance and bullying and violence. That is not the answer. It's just not. [BREAK] Anna Martin: Terry, I'm curious whether this mission of reaching men feels more urgent to you now than it has before. Terry Real: Oh, my god. I mean, I would say the house is burning. That's not a metaphor. Our planet is burning. I started off my last book, 'Us,' with what the father of family therapy, the great anthropologist Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead's husband — who is truly the creator of family therapy — Bateson called Western civilization's philosophical error. And that's this: that we stand apart from nature. That's individualism. That's what the word 'individual' means. We stand apart from nature. That's what I call toxic individualism. And we control nature. That's patriarchy. And whether the nature we think we can and should control is our bodies, our marriages, our kids, our country, the planet — the delusion of dominance is suicidal at this point. Anna Martin: I mean, you've written before about some of the progress you've seen men make over the years. You wrote once that millennial men, in particular, were the most gender-progressive generation maybe ever. And given what we've been talking about, the resurgence of traditional masculinity, the manosphere, I just wonder, does that trend feel like it's reversing for you right now? Terry Real: Yes, it does, 100 percent. It's a backlash. It's a resurgence. And, frankly, I think it's the death — is the last gasp of a model of power and masculinity that, look, relationality is the card I've got in my back pocket. And that's what we're born for. That's what we're designed for. And that's what will keep us and this planet alive. The dominance model makes for miserable people, miserable marriages, miserable families, and will choke the planet Earth. Anna Martin: Man. I mean, but it seems like that is the direction that we're headed in. I mean, you said that this is kind of the last — Terry Real: Gasp. Anna Martin: — gasp, but I don't know. It doesn't feel like a last gasp. It feels like perhaps this approach to the world is gaining steam. Terry Real: Well, it is gaining steam in the moment. I believe that an accurate reflection of reality will prevail. The dysfunctionality of this approach will become more and more clear. And people will move into something more mature and nuanced. The issue is how many generations is that going to take, and what kind of shape will we be in? What I work with, with the guys I work with, is what I call 'learning to become family men.' And what I say is a boy's question of the world is: What have you got for me? It's gratification. What have you got? What have you got for me? A man's question of the world is: What do you need? What do you need? And being a family man means what's central here is not you and your needs. What's central here is the team and what they need from you. I talked to many of the men I work with about the distinction between gratification and what I call 'relational joy.' And gratification is just what you think it is. It's a short-term hit of pleasure — taking a drink, smoking a joint. A pretty girl flirts with you. You make a killing that day in the stock market. Your kid gets an A. Great. I like pleasure in its place. Relational joy, which I have to teach so many of the men I work with even what it is, relational joy is a deeper-down pleasure that comes just from being in the relationship and being connected. And sometimes it's gratifying. Sometimes it's a pain in the neck. I tell the story of my beautiful Alexander, now 35. When he was little, I was giving him a timeout. And we didn't have locks, and so I was holding his bedroom door shut. I mean, this guy was like maybe 2-foot-3. And that door on the other side, I mean, it was like Polterg — lightning was coming out of that. I mean, the Earth — Anna Martin: You were holding the door shut because he was inside because he needed to be in timeout, and you didn't have a lock on the door. I can see the scene in my head. OK. Terry Real: Yeah, and that little guy is trying to get it open. And I'm telling you, it's all — so a part of me wanted to just throw him — truly, I talk about 'normal hatred' in families — a part of me wanted to just throw him through the window. I was so mad. Yet a deeper-down part was like, you mighty little spirit, you. Anna Martin: Wow. Terry Real: You're going to do great. And what so many of the men in our culture don't understand is the simple joy of being in connection. Anna Martin: Terry, I have just a couple more questions for you. Here's a big one. Why should men listen to what you have to say? Terry Real: Men should listen to what I'm saying because it's in your interest to. You will be happier. Your marriage will be happier. You will change the legacy that you pass on to your children. And listen, I know how important that is to you out there, whoever is listening, that guy. The American dream — everybody talks about, what is it? The American dream is the dream that our children will have it better than we did. When we think about that, we almost always think about that in terms of material success. But I want you to think about your children having a better legacy than you had. Anna Martin: I think men will listen. Terry Real: You know, the thing is that I'm right. Anna Martin: [LAUGHS] 'The thing is that I'm right.' I love it. I mean, I love it. Yeah. Terry Real: So — Anna Martin: Terry, you've mentioned your wife, Belinda, who's also a family therapist. Terry Real: Brilliant, brilliant therapist. Yes. Anna Martin: Can I ask you? A thing I find really remarkable and, frankly, soothing about talking to you is you have an answer and, usually, a phrase, or you've written a book as an answer to so many of my questions. But of course, no one has all of the answers. And we are constantly working on ourselves. And I guess, really, to close, what is something that you are working on in yourself and in your marriage to Belinda? Terry Real: Yeah, this is hilarious. Anna Martin: [LAUGHS] Terry Real: So in families, there are famous stories. And here's one that was true then, and I'm still working on it now. When my kids were teenagers — they're in their 30s now — they both joined hands and bounced up to me and said, 'Dad, are you aware of the fact that when we confront you with something we're critical about, that you're dismissive of us?' And this is absolutely true. And I looked at them, and I said, 'That's ridiculous.' Anna Martin: [LAUGHS] Terry Real: [LAUGHS] Anna Martin: I don't do that. Stop it. Yeah. [LAUGHS] Terry Real: So let's just leave it there. Anna Martin: [LAUGHS] That is so sweet. Terry Real, thank you so much for this conversation. It gave me a lot to think about, and I'm grateful. Terry Real: I'm very grateful. It's been a blast talking to you. I really appreciate it. Terry will be back on the podcast in a few weeks to talk about fatherhood. And he has agreed to give our listeners advice. So if you are a dad, about to be a dad or dad-adjacent in some way, we'd love to hear your questions for Terry. Perhaps you're wondering how to parent in a world filled with mixed messages about masculinity, or how to repair a mistake you've made. Maybe you feel like you're doing great, but there's one part of fatherhood that's hard to figure out. Send us your questions, and Terry will do his best to answer them. Please record them as a voice memo and send them to modernlovepodcast@ (We've also been asking listeners to share stories about their dads for our Father's Day episode, and we are still accepting those stories, too.) Tips for recording: Please avoid recording where there is a lot of background noise. If you use a smartphone to record, please speak into the built-in microphone from a few inches away. Your recording may not be clear if you use Bluetooth earbuds, or if you are too close or too far from the phone. Tell us your story as if you are speaking to a friend. Be concise, and please listen back to make sure the recording is complete. You can find more tips and our submission terms here.
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Couple Whose Love Story Went Viral Had Decided for Years Not to Get Married — and Then One Day, She Proposed
Mandy Len Catron went viral for an essay for The New York Times' Modern Love in 2015 Ten years later, she has married the man she wrote about after they welcomed twin sons during the COVID-19 pandemic The so-called "36 questions to fall in love" — which Catron had written about — were included at their receptionWhen Mandy Len Catron posed one of psychologist Arthur Aron's "36 questions to fall in love" to Mark Janusz Bondyra on their first date in July 2014, his response made her 'gulp' her beer. 'Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common,' Catron, an author and lecturer at the University of British Columbia, asked at the bar in downtown Vancouver in Canada. 'I think we're both interested in each other,' Bondyra, a user experience designer and business analyst, responded. The question and intriguing answer, and the scene itself, are part of Catron's essay "To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This" for The New York Times' Modern Love column, which went viral when it ran the following January. Bondyra and Catron ended their date by staring into each other's eyes for four minutes — another recommendation from Aron. That November, while out dancing during a Halloween party, Bondyra told Catron that he loved her, according to the Times. More than a decade after their first date, the couple married in an intimate ceremony — a decision that they didn't know if they'd ever make. For Catron, now 44, who has spent her career researching relationships, marriage is 'the ultimate expression of romantic love — and actually, that's a pretty modern idea,' she told the Times. For a long time, she said, committing to Bondyra without making it legal was their way of 'acknowledging some of the problems with the institution" (and "maybe resisting a little bit') But then, in August 2024, the author of the 2018 memoir How to Fall in Love with Anyone, decided to propose after they couldn't decide between a commitment or traditional wedding ceremony, the Times reported. 'Of course. Of course I'll marry you,' said Bondyra, 49, who shares twin sons with Catron. He was surprised but elated. The pair were married at the Pacific Spirit Regional Park on Saturday, May 3, surrounded by 11 guests. A friend officiated and, after the ceremony on that brisk but sunny day, the couple proceeded to celebrate with a champagne toast at their house and 70-person reception at a Belgian-style restaurant, according to the Times. Catron made sure to include the famous 36 questions on name cards and in a bowl at the bar at the reception. Never miss a story — sign up for to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. As she explained to the Times, the choice to get married had become more appealing with time. She and Bondyra struggled with fertility treatments that didn't work, then had to navigate a difficult pregnancy. Catron was hospitalized for weeks before she gave birth to their sons during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, in September 2021. "It was just a series of hard, hard things,' she told the Times. 'And people — our friends and family — really took care of us through that.' As the pandemic ended, Caton wanted to celebrate with everyone who showered them with love during that difficult time. And celebrate her bond with Bondyra, too. Or, as she wrote in her viral essay a decade ago, 'Love didn't happen to us. We're in love because we each made the choice to be.' Read the original article on People
Eater
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Eater
One of New York's Essential Vegan Restaurants Is Closing
One of New York's biggest vegan chefs is closing her Brooklyn vegan comfort food restaurant this summer. Owner Isa Chandra Moskowitz will shutter Modern Love at 317 Union Avenue, near South First Street in Williamsburg, sometime in June, after eight years of service. Moskowitz tells Eater via email that she had to close Modern Love basically because the business model wasn't working, and she had 'to change our entire concept.' The pandemic shift to more deliveries and takeout business 'isn't sustainable for a sit-down restaurant,' she explains. While the restaurant does offer pickup and delivery orders (and, according to her, sales were good), 'it's impossible to absorb the cuts that third-party apps take.' At the same time, earlier in April, Moskowitz urged people to visit the restaurant so she could raise money to fix the air conditioning, opting not to go the GoFundMe route. This isn't the end for Modern Love, though — Moskowitz wants to relocate the restaurant with a different service model. She hasn't set a last date of service yet. Fellow vegan restaurants like Seasoned Vegan (which also closed in late April) and Toad Style flocked to the Instagram announcement post to share their love and condolences for the restaurant, known for its American vegan comfort food. Meanwhile, fans like singer and musician Ted Leo chimed in, writing that the restaurant is 'the best and we're here for whatever you do next, my friend.' The restaurant was known for its American vegan comfort food, which New York Magazine described as ' innovative, plant-based renderings of various hearty classics.' That includes dishes like the mushroom fried chick'n, truffled poutine, and the cashew cheddar macaroni. Brooklyn-native Moskowitz is one of New York's earlier vegan leaders. She hosted her own cooking show, Post Punk Kitchen , from 2003 to 2005; and wrote cookbooks like Vegan with a Vengeance (2005) and Veganomicon (2007). And actually, she first opened Modern Love in Omaha in 2013. Then she expanded into Brooklyn in 2016. The Nebraska location moved addresses in 2018 and ended up closing in late 2024. Sign up for our newsletter.
