Welcome to Strangers from KCW and Radiotopia.

I'm Leah Tao.

For a long time, my stepmother had a cutout hanging on the fridge.

Just a tiny fragment from a Danish newspaper, which said, and I'm translating,

for decades, women seem to have been asking themselves the following questions. How do I get a man? How do I hold onto him? How do I

put up with him? How do I get rid of him? And how do I find a new one? And look, before you start

sending emails, I know many of you out there don't even want a man. Perhaps you want a woman.

Perhaps you enjoy being single. Or perhaps you love the man you have and don't want to replace him.

Or perhaps you are a man and you want somebody of want to replace him, or perhaps you are a man

and you want somebody of your own to hold on to and put up with and get rid of, okay? So it's not

perfect. But this quote always makes me laugh. It has some truth in it about the common

struggles of modern love, I think. And not just for straight women. If we make it gender-neutral

for a moment, I think many of us, whether divorced or married or single, have been through at least

some of the stages and questions raised by that paragraph, right? But in a less snarky and more inclusive way, what are the stages of love?

And what are the funny, gut-wrenching, bewildering things we go through in the name of love?

Well, we're going to look at that in a new series starting today, which we're calling Summer of Love.

Mostly, these will just be stories we like and want to share with you. They're not interconnected.

You don't have to listen to them as a series,

but each one represents a different stage in a love relationship

or in the absence of a love relationship.

So for all you lonely hearts out there going great summer of love,

are you kidding me? It's summertime. I'm not in love.

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