Love, Lust, Loneliness: A Valentine’s Day Reading List
February 13, 2025 at 03:30PM
Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
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“The finest romances have the messiest stories,” Lisa Bubert wrote in her reading list on weird, chaotic love stories. “Give me the complicated, the missed connections, the big gestures, the bittersweet endings. Give me the struggle, because it’s the struggle that makes it love.”
The stories below, from our Longreads archive and across the web, echo Bubert’s observations: Love is messy and complex. Thirteen years into marriage, I have to agree. In the beginning, ours was an improbable romance that spanned 7,447 miles between San Francisco and Cairo—a courtship that unraveled across WordPress blog comments, remarkably long emails, and WhatsApp voice notes. A love story indeed. These days, it’s sometimes hard to remember that story continues—let alone live it, alongside another.
As I selected essays and features to include in this collection, I was reminded of all the different ways we experience connection, longing, love, marriage, sex, separation, and divorce. There are stories here of people finding or losing someone, finding themselves, or, with each encounter or breakup, coming closer to their own definitions of love. Among these, I hope you find a story that resonates.
—Cheri
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/02/13/valentines-love-marriage-relationships-sex/
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