love | The Smart Set

Days of Long Ago

Elliot Wilner — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 11:30:00 +0000

Dozens of young adults, most of them Scandinavian tourists, were happily chattering in the lobby of Eilat’s Hotel Snapir soon after sunset, after having spent another toasty day on the beach. The lobby was uncomfortably warm, maybe due to the heat that radiated from the tourists’ sunburned skins. Passing through the lobby, I opened the […]

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Arranging Love

Usha Raj — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 12:30:00 +0000

Years after my mother had died, on a visit to my father in his childhood home in Nagercoil, India, where he had settled after his retirement, he told me he had always wanted to marry a Tamil girl from a prominent Christian family. Someone who had been selected by his beloved mother, someone who would […]

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Take Only One Memory

Joylyn Chai — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 12:30:00 +0000

If I could take only one memory into eternity, it would be the evening I fell in love with my husband. Long ago, I saw the film After Life by Japanese director, Hirokazu Koreeda. After watching two hours of an imagined purgatory set in what looked like an abandoned, unheated high school, I left the […]

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Irresponsible Words of Love

Kate Poverman — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 13:42:59 +0000

I have made reckless pronouncements of love. These declarations are usually inappropriate, always unexpected, and often result in consequences I neither anticipate nor desire. I first realized this after I graduated from law school and started seeing a gastroenterologist at the University of Chicago hospital. As a law student, I’d seen the specialist in Student […]

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Department of Lost and Found

Lynn Sikkink — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 11:30:00 +0000

Nate still hadn’t returned to the campsite. As the sunlight faded behind the mountains, the cool shadows creeping down their slopes, I pictured the clothes he had been wearing: a cotton t-shirt and baggy shorts, with strappy Chacos for footwear — the uniform of a male college student. In my down jacket, I shivered. A […]

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Primordial Love

Erin Byrne — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 12:30:00 +0000

My preferred distance away from my sons is zero. Even when they were newborns, slurping milk in the cradle of my arm (further away than when in utero), I’d succumb to a craving and press my nose to the tops of their heads, first Kellan and four years later, Brendan, and absorb their patinas, which […]

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Loving You More

Colin Fleming — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 12:33:00 +0000

As a burgeoning, avid collector of Beatles bootlegs, there was one record at the top of my wish list that I couldn’t wait to lay my teenage mitts upon. Rounding up unreleased music was no small effort at the time. One did not enter the name of whatever one wished to hear into the YouTube […]

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Like A Bridge

Hannah Ratner — Thu, 08 Jul 2021 11:30:00 +0000

Garfunkel never seems to know what to do with his hands. His left thumb is hooked in his jeans’ pocket; his right hand grasps the microphone. It is September 19, 1981, and the duo that was Simon & Garfunkel is reuniting to perform a free concert in Central Park, New York. As the opening piano […]

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Paris, For You

Joe McAvoy — Mon, 28 Jun 2021 11:37:00 +0000

Princess cards she sends me, with her regards Barroom eyes shine vacancy, to see her you gotta look hard “For You,” Bruce Springsteen The first cards — written in a familiar, flowing cursive; one smudged with a wine-stained fingerprint — arrived in mid-Fall 1974. My kinda girlfriend, Kyle — my wife, now, of 40 years — […]

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His Hands

Chikere Oduocha — Mon, 17 May 2021 11:21:00 +0000

This is part of a larger series about objects from a course taught by Marek Makowski, whose essay “Who Are the Writers Now?” kicked off this series. Amanda Crummy’s essay, “Handle with MMA Gloves” was the first in this series. And Emma Duffing’s “The Pillow” is the last. For my father. At the end of […]

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