Everyone always talks about how the Modern Love essays published each Sunday in the New York Times are consistently cringe-worthy and grimace-inducing. But, much like the weather, no one ever does anything about it.

Until now.

Below, an inventory of the most offensive aspects of these failed love stories, as well as guidelines that would encourage more entertaining submissions.

The Principal Offenses

1. Careerism. Anyone who writes and aspires to be read knows how difficult it is to get published in a mass market newspaper or magazine. But relating the very personal, embarrassing, and thinly-veiled facts of your romantic imbroglios, amorous train-wrecks and sexual fiascos in a personal essay published in the Times is the equivalent of an aspiring film-maker sending home-made porn videos featuring ex-lovers to Dream Works in the hopes of impressing with his or her directing chops.

Actually, no it´s not.  It´s the equivalent of posting those videos on You Tube and then sending the links to the producers, never mind that a million prurient voyeurs will be ogling your private business.

Come on, now!  You knew what you were getting into when you enrolled in that MFA program; everyone told you it wasn´t a way to make money and you better be willing to do the work without recognition or even publication. In a better world, no one would deem it a fair trade to exchange their dignity for a byline in the Times. You could at least use a pseudonym. But then you wouldn´t be able to include the story of your crazy and cruel boyfriend in the clippings you mass mail to editors and agents along with your pitch for a memoir titled: My Embarrassing Life Presented For Your Morbid Delectation.

2. Spitefulness. She didn´t love you? He didn´t call? She didn´t care? He called you fat? She said she hated sex and then you caught her with the handyman? That sucks and is sad and your tales of broken-hearted lust, crazed stalking, unrequited love, enduring depression and slow, shaky, feline-accompanied recovery have a highway smash-up quality that panders to the worst in all of us (which is, of course, why the Times prints your spew). If you stopped at humiliating yourself and the thinly-veiled dude or chick who ruined your life with their failure to assuage all your fears and insecurities and provide you with unconditional love and on-command hot and cold running orgasms, well, that would be merely undignified, unaware and self-absorbed.

But so many of the Modern Love essays also have a passive-aggressive and catty pay-back dimension, a sharp blade hidden beneath the tear-soaked hankie you´re waving around. The villain´s past foibles are not only revealed in the essay for their blood-on-the-cracked-windshield value, but most essays then jump forward to provide a current update, validating your victimhood and proving that it really wasn´t your fault and that the experience wasn´t some fluke, but rather the ineluctable result of his or her shitty charcter. The drunk cad ends up on skid row or in jail. The money-grubbing whore finishes with one fake tit bigger than the other and a case of genital herpes so virulent that its like a church choir yowling every time she removes her underpants.

The problem is that most of those terrible flaws of you ex-lovers are hidden flaws and were only revealed to you in the illuminating glow of mutually-enjoyed (for a time anyway) intimacy. If they were evident to all, that is to say public, you probably wouldn´t have started the affair in the first place. Now everyone knows. Congratulations! Vengeance is a personal essay best served in around 1,800 words on Page 9, Section 6 of the Sunday Times. Sadly for you, the weep-and-jab technique often has the opposite of its intended effect. Instead of eliciting a sympathetic response from the reader, it makes us empathize with the person who supposedly did you wrong.

 Truth be told, you sound like a total nightmare.

3. Depressing. You were both obese. She got cancer and you left her. You met on a living-with-herpes love site. He gave you an itchy rash and then wouldn´t take your calls. She laughed at your jokes when she was hammered but found you painfully boring when sober. You married too young and realized that in fact you´re gay. You knew you were gay but you felt sorry for your old, sad, unmarried friend and wanted to have children. Car crashes, abortions, rotten teeth, genital dysfunction, oozing sores, unabashed stalking, rickets, fistulas, bottomless despair— every week a new tale of the unpleasant, ill-fated and (for the reader) emetic. She stopped waxing. He cheated. She let you down. He stopped buying you flowers.

Shit! Enough, please!

Love is the wonder and bliss at the very center of existence. Why should tales of modern love be relentlessly unhappy and joyless? Maybe this very common offense in the Modern Love columns is really best divided into two sub-headings: “Depressing Physical and/or Mental Impairment” and “Depressing Misapprehension of the Meaning of Love.” So many of the weekly offering are either sad tales of aberrant morphology and psychology (too fat, too small, too incontinent, too bibulous, too demented) that precludes or encumbers intimacy. Or else they are tales of the disappointment that inevitably follows from the belief that love is something your partner is obligated to give you (like a monthly stipend of spending money or a vial of magic elixir) and that you can then take this ration of love and use it to bribe your demons or scrub away the spots on your character.

Either way, it makes for depressing reading and more accurate titles for the feature would be “Modern Freak Love” or “Modern Egomania.”

4. Extreme Arc-iness. The Times Metropolitan Diary entries are more annoying than the Modern Love essays due to their smug and hokey self-congratulatory pseudo-intellectual dorkiness, but at least they are mere vignettes. They are unambitious with regard to dramatic structure. Not so, these tales of cupid´s nasty fuck-ups. Nearly all tilt at a three-act structure, attempting to wrap things up with a cathartic climax and wistful denouement. This almost always comes across as forced and false, probably because love and romance and sex and love affairs are never so tidy and well-structured. They start and stop and start again. They are amorphous and then sharply drawn and then ooze and bleed out into the rest of your life. They almost never terminate with a full-stop, a line-break and a new beginning. They linger in memory and in artifacts of time spent together. They emerge in dreams and in fantasies. They lie invisible as mugwamps in the silt of remorse and regret and then explode into consciousness as irrational longing and desire that emanates from the limbic brain in abstract and ever-changing psychedelic patterns of anguish and masochism.

That´s why love is (and has always been) such a mind-fuck.

Maybe prostitutes have amorous affairs with clearly defined beginnings, middles and ends, if not a dramatic arc that Socrates would cheer. “A Hooker´s Tale” or “My First Whore”- now those would be subjects that might lend themselves to a discrete and structured treatment, although perhaps too piquant and venereal for the current Times Modern Love editorial mandate. But despite the inherent implausibility, these essays will have their narrative arc or die trying.

There is the requisite opening grabber, often mixed with an effort to establish the uniqueness and often the “New Yorky-ness” of the love story. Viz, “Bob and I fell in love while lost in a bird´s nest of moldy baguettes in a garbage pail on 34th Street.”

Then comes the quasi-dramatic escalation with its goals and its barriers to reaching those goals (and a requisite smattering of picturesque details): “Bob dreamed of moving up to a dumpster and for many years we shared that dream. We had our hearts set on a spacious double-wide bin off Bryant Park but first we´d have to oust the evil Puerto Rican meth-head tranny who used it as a storage place for her amazing array of Versace ball gowns.”

Then, all hail the apotheosis: “I slammed the trash lid shut on Bob´s barnacle-crusted dong. He was my love, but by filming our non-consensual trash sex and putting it on the internet he had soiled our love even more than the garbage haulers strike had fouled our make-shift home.”

Then we wrap-up in the last few paragraphs with a life lesson learned and a nostalgic, flatulent sigh, preferably with some more New Yorky accents: “A few years later I found myself playing checkers with another crazy lady near the public library and I spotted Bob and the Tranny-boy Ramón dancing cheek-to-cheek on top of a garbage truck while the cigar-chomping Italian driver sang along to Frank Sinatra´s Summer Wind, gunning the engine on his way to some faraway Jersey dump where the rotten left-overs of failed love affairs are picked over by hungry seagulls. My crazy life of dumpster diving (and living) was behind me. I am an aspiring memoirist now (and someone who would very much like to find a literary agent to represent my work— email me at dumpsterdouche@mindspring.com), but I still lift the lids of trash cans now and then looking for love, or at least some day-old donuts.”

New Guidelines

More Good Sex: It´s Sunday, for fuck´s sake, how about a little something to spice up the weekend. New York Times readers deserve some tasteful erotica to break the monotony of toasted bagels, burnt coffee and the droning of N.P.R.   It doesn´t have to get all Penthouse Forum; a subtle but steamy Anais Nin treatment is what Modern Love needs. The print version of the Red Shoe Diaries. What a pleasure to peruse an essay that induced a boner or some lubricity. What a joy to read one that began with the classic Playboy letters overture of “I never thought this would happen to me. . . “ and not have the story be about spousal abuse between transgendered schizophrenics or the sad tale of a woman who married for money and then realized that her shallow husband was leaving her for someone younger.

A salacious soft-core slant to the feature might even spark a baby boom among liberal secular upper-middle-class intellectuals, a barely replacement rate bi-coastal demographic that is being swamped by the multitudinous offspring of conservative holy warriors across the nation. One imagines eyebrows arching all up and down the Upper West Side and in Park Slope. New Yorker Magazines pushed to the floor. Lox set aside in favor of a lusty embrace. Crosswords abandoned. Terry Gross on Fresh Air being drowned out by Ivy League howls of bawdy pleasure. Poppy seeds stuck to sweaty backs.  Jew-fro´s meeting pube-fro´s as cunning linguists pursue clumsy cunnilingus, the untenured meeting the unwaxed in a smarty-pants sexual frenzy. Imagine all those pale, skinny, nerdy limbs intertwined in the bright light of day instead of the accustomed nocturnal coupling.

Actually, ew. . . forget it.

More Joy: Enough stories about the guys who can´t get laid and the girls who don´t feel appreciated and couples splitting up. More Samantha from Sex and the City and less Miss Fucking Havisham. More Portnoy and Tony Soprano and less Helen Keller. The unrepentant sybarites and pleasure-seeking seducers, the poetry-spewing young lovers and back-seat frotteurs, the flirtatious nymphs and sex-addled old Humberts, the love-drunk and the shyly smitten— those are the stories we want to hear.

I suspect the reason we don´t see more such submissions isn´t that these happy tales don´t exist or wouldn´t make good copy, but rather because the blissful fornicators, proud nymphos and unrepentant lotharios are too busy enjoying life to write about it. That leaves us with bitter shrews and bashful dorks channeling Sylvia Plath and James Frey with their yucky anecdotes of handsy pedophile uncles and erection-crippling drug addiction.

Rebuttals: An equal space should be provided on the facing page of each essay for a response by the person whose ex is relating the tale. If the person is deceased, then a friend or family member could step in to give another perspective.  Yes, he strayed with the secretary, but you failed to mention that you gained fifty pounds and spent all day on Second Life. True, she was a loving wife until she died after fifty years of marriage, but she always complained about your cheapness and would have been appalled at the chintzy coffin you bought her. Imagine the entertainment value!  Not to mention the time and money the Times would save on fact-checking!

Copyright Last Exit 2008