## Background Modern Love is a weekly personal essay column in The New York Times, launched in 2004 and edited for most of its run by Dan Jones. It has become one of the most widely read and culturally influential homes for personal essay/memoir writing in America, built entirely around true, first-person stories about contemporary relationships — romantic love, marriage, dating, parenthood, family, and loss — with a specific emphasis on stories that reflect something distinctly modern, some element of the experience that would not have existed or made sense 20 to 50 years ago. Selected essays are frequently adapted for the Modern Love podcast, and the column spawned an Amazon anthology TV series of the same name. Because of the Times's reach, a Modern Love byline is an unusually high-visibility placement for a personal essay — arguably the most widely read single venue for memoir-style writing of any on this list — but that visibility comes with correspondingly steep odds. ## Submissions - Word count: 1,500–1,700 words. - Submission periods: September–December and March–June. - Essays must be entirely true: no pseudonyms (including for the author), no composite characters, no invented scenes or situations. - Must be previously unpublished, including not having appeared on personal blogs, other news sites, or platforms like Medium. - Extremely competitive: the column reportedly receives around 8,000 submissions a year for a small number of weekly slots, with acceptance odds cited at around 1%. Submission guidance and process (via Jane Friedman's overview, sourced from the column's own public guidance): [janefriedman.com/how-to-get-published-in-modern-love-mcsweeneys-or-anywhere-else-you-want](https://janefriedman.com/how-to-get-published-in-modern-love-mcsweeneys-or-anywhere-else-you-want/)