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

Stories of Love, Loss and Redemption. I'm your host, Megna Chacrabardi.

Breakups. Some of us handled them more gracefully than others. Steve Friedman's story of a particularly messy breakup became the very first Modern Love column ever published back in 2004.

Emmy Award winner Tony Hale reads this one for us. You've seen him as Gary Walsh on HBO's VEEP or as Buster Bluth in Arrested Development.

Here he is with Steve's essay, Just Friends. Let me read between the lines.

She dumped me. What's important in not the details but the pronoun placement? She preceding me. But there's no villain here.

My therapist suggests I repeat this mantra to myself. So I do. There is no villain here.

There is no green-eyed, wasp-waisted, pillow-breasted, sneering queen of the damn villain who dumped me so swiftly and was such an impurious, frigid beauty that I experienced chest pains and shortness of breath, leading to something called a Cardiolite Stress Test,

which I just discovered my insurance company may not pay for, in which it's left me not only miserable and lonely and occasionally sobbing in public bathrooms but also about $6,000 in debt.

But no one is the blame here. My therapist suggests I repeat this phrase too. No one is the blame here.

Did she have her reasons? Could I have been a better boyfriend?

Is it telling that I was 48 when we met and never married that I had spent the better part of three decades shedding, wedding, happy, sweet hearts as a tail-back dances away from fiendish linebackers?

And that I had recently looked in the mirror and seen staring back male pattern baldness and the egregious folly of my broken-field running brand of romance.

Ha! No good can come from dwelley on such questions. So, let's assume she had her reasons.

What's important is not what she did or why. What's important is how I handled it.

...