Thoughtful stories for thoughtless times.
Longreads has published hundreds of original stories—personal essays, reported features, reading lists, and more—and more than 14,000 editor’s picks. And they’re all funded by readers like you. Become a member today.
“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
Longreads essays
The Road to Becoming Enough
I began, if not to turn away from the mythical notion of a man to “complete” me, to accept that there was no love out there for me. I chose mountains instead.
Age, Sex, Location
Chatrooms taught me everything I needed to know about what real people were like before I had to grow up and become one of them.
Creation of Woman: Evangelical and Transgender in the Bible Belt
How a spouse’s confession freed a young couple from gender expectations in the Deep South.
The Teacher Crush
What happens when a teenager develops a risky infatuation?
The State of Waiting
Separated by war, boundaries, and immigration policies they cannot control, one young Yemeni couple refuses to give up on love.
Cocooning
“In coming out, my life ended. It was a personal apocalypse of many smaller revelations. The struggle that had defined me had reached its denouement of freedom—and what comes after freedom?”
The Lie of ‘One Last Time’ with My Ex
Ella Dawson learns about the perils of break-up sex the hard way.
A True (Non-Hierarchical, Shared) Love
Journalist Mithila Phadke navigates polyamory while falling in love for the first time.
The Power of a Judith Krantz Sex Scene
A ‘90s romance novel offers a glimpse of queer possibility and illuminates the complications of writing about queer love.
McDreamy, McSteamy, and McConnell
Congressional fan fiction is real, it’s glorious, and it might be reshaping our political world.
Who Do You Belong To?
When she dipped her heart into someone else’s relationship, Emily Lackey discovered how to define love on her own terms.
Longreads reading lists
Recommended reads across the web
The Vegan Hunter
“A bad breakup and a love for nature inspire a taste for eating meat.”
In Every Nelson He Visits, Jeff Truesdell Finds the Man He Loved
“How do you live with the loss of a loved one? For Truesdell, it means visiting every Nelson in North America.”
Secret in the Walls: Hidden Letters Reveal Love, Lust, Scandal in 1920s Baltimore Society
“Her search for answers would plunge her into 1920s Baltimore society: a celebrated Johns Hopkins scientist, a famous mountaineer and a trailblazing female journalist.”
Loving Him Meant Facing My Greatest Fear
“Living with a disability, I shielded myself from dance. Then I met him.”
We’re So Back
“The ‘get-your-ex-back’ industry is booming. It really shouldn’t be.”
Last Love: a Romance in a Care Home
“Mary and Derek weren’t the first couple to get together at Easterlea Rest Home. But those other relationships had been more like friendships – and this was something else entirely.”
“To the Train Lady with Dark Brown Hair … :” Extraordinary Stories of Four Couples who Found Love via Small Ads
“Is the medium dying? What might we lose if we let it go, like a stranger rounding an airport corner?”
The Age Gappers
“They say they’re happy. Why is it so hard to believe them?”
A Maui Love Story
“When 18-year-olds Lanz Aguinaldo and Isabella Lynch’s hometown went up in flames, they turned toward each other to survive.”
The Nonstop Gay Sex Party on the Mexico City Subway
“The city’s metro hosts—and authorities unofficially sanction—a queer institution unlike any other.”
The Strange Romance of Seahorses
“A marine biologist and photographer gets up close and personal with mysterious pygmy seahorses.”
A Work of Love
“Before gay marriage was legal, illustrator John Megahan was called to work on a revolutionary secret project: bringing to life, in painstaking scientific detail, the queer lives of the animal world.”
