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Produced by the I-Lab at WBUR Boston.

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

Stories of Love, Loss and Redemption.

I'm your host, Megna Chacrabardi.

What happens when you want to marry someone, but you're also falling in love with someone else?

Is there a way for you to have everything and everyone?

Sophie Lucido Johnson's essay is called Talking to My Fiance about my new girlfriend.

It's read by Dewanda Wise. She stars in the new movie Someone Great alongside Gina Rodriguez

and plays Nola Darling in She's Gotta Have It on Netflix.

Luc came to my front door in New Orleans on a sunny day several years ago with a sparsely decorated cassette tape and said,

I made this for you. I could tell this was a move he had used with other women, but I had to hand it to him.

It was a good one. This wasn't the 90s when mix tapes were a popular medium for revealing a crush.

Even Mixed CDs had come and gone. If you were going to use someone else's songwriting to convey your feelings, you did it with a Spotify playlist.

I was charmed at Luc liked music and was obstinately analog about it.

I'd only recently started dating Luc. We were doing that casual millennial thing that begins on Tinder and spreads into bar dates.

Sandwich between bar dates with other people. I tended to be dating three people at a time, both men and women,

and the life spans of my pseudo relationships averaged two months or so. I liked it this way.

A capital R relationship seemed too big for my life. A concrete shape I had no room for.

But when I listened to Luc's Mixed Tape, I felt tricked. This was not a casual Mixed Tape.

It had folk songs about longing and soul music about feelings. It had ain't no mountain high enough and something by usher.

Luc soon revealed himself to be good not only at making Mixed Tapes, but also vegetarian lentil stew and weekend travel plans to canoe through Lafayette to find Armadillo's.

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