How I Decentered Men and Learned to Center Myself

Modern Love

The New York Times

Nytimes, Redemption, Society & Culture, New York Times, Love, Essay, Storytelling, Loss, Nyt

4.4 • 8.7K Ratings

🗓️ 19 March 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Natasha Rothwell plays characters who are constantly trying to improve and to better understand their desires. This season on “The White Lotus,” Rothwell, an Emmy-nominated actress, is back playing Belinda, a striving spa manager with dreams of becoming her own boss. Ambitions like these are relatable to Rothwell, who created and starred in her own show, “How to Die Alone.” But as she and her characters have learned, going after what you want often means changing your priorities and steering away from certain types of people. Today on the show, Rothwell reads Jasmine Browley’s Modern Love essay, “I Decentered Men. Decentering Desire for Men Is Harder,” about the challenges and joys of putting your own needs first. And Rothwell tells Anna Martin how vision boarding has helped her center herself. Here’s how to submit a Modern Love essay to The New York Times. Here’s how to submit a Tiny Love Story.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Love now and all.
0:03.1	Love was stronger than anything.
0:07.1	And I love you more than anything.
0:10.3	What is love?
0:11.1	There's to love.
0:11.9	Love.
0:12.6	Love.
0:16.6	From the New York Times, I'm Anna Martin.
0:19.0	This is Modern Love.
0:20.3	Every week, we bring you stories
0:21.5	about love, lust, and all the messiness of relationships, inspired by the Modern Love
0:26.5	column. This week, Emmy-nominated actor and writer Natasha Rothwell. You might recognize her
0:36.0	from the HBO show, The White Lotus, where she plays Belinda, a spa manager.
0:41.1	This season, season three, she's finally getting some spa treatments for herself while she's on a work exchange in Thailand.
0:47.3	But in season one, when we first met her, she was trying to figure out how to become her own boss, as she worked at a hotel in Hawaii.
0:53.8	Yeah, I just got to work
0:54.9	myself. You're never not at work. Well, you think I'm working hard now. Wait till I start my own
1:01.3	business. What are you talking about? I don't know. I think I'm getting ahead of myself. Like her character,
1:08.5	Rothwell is no stranger to manifesting what she wants.
1:12.2	Way before she was even cast in the White Lotus, she dreamed of working with its creator, Mike White.
1:17.4	He is someone that I was just like, I want to be in his orbit.
1:20.9	And then when the show came to be, I was terrified.
	...

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