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From the New York Times and WBUR Boston, this is Modern Love.

Stories of Love, Laws, and Redemption.

I'm your host, Megna Chakrabardi.

The New York Times and WBUR Boston,

The New York Times and WBUR Boston,

Sometimes outside tensions create the energy needed to heal what's hurting inside a relationship.

That was the case for Teresa DeFalco and her husband Anthony.

When their marriage started to come apart, a neighborhood troublemaker inadvertently created more good than bad.

Melanie Linsky reads for us this week.

You may know her from HBO's Togetherness and CBS's Two and a Half Men.

Here she is reading Teresa DeFalco's essay, It Took a Villain to Save Our Marriage.

Here are three truths.

Intimacy isn't always sweet.

The suburbs can be lonely.

And, as the writer Mary Kentwell said,

Marriages, at least in the beginning, take three people.

The third provides the glow.

Anthony and I were in year six of our marriage, not the beginning, but we needed glow.

We lived in a suburb, the kind where everyone is friendly, but no one seems to be a friend.

Our house was on a short street at the top of a hill.

We lived at one end of a cul-de-sac, and a man named Gary lived at the other end, six houses down.

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