DEAR READERS,

What’s Modern Love? Well, first off, it’s a New York Times column that claims to represent the state of love in our time, the trials and travails of romance in the post-2000 era. Unfortunately, what it ends up doing is collecting a rose-tinted series of memoirs and mishaps of divorcee couples, suddenly-enlightened middle age women sleeping with younger men, and the odd young person flouting all digital norms and actually going out on dates.

The column is a collection of foregone conclusions, archetypal stories that end before they start. We want to provide a different perspective. With our version of Modern Love, Millennials Magazine Issue 2, we’re not going to give you any answers. What you will find here are questions and arguments, searches for the meaning of intimate relationships in a time where closeness is more easily conducted in a chat window than in person, rather than conclusions about The Way We Love Now. We don’t know how we love now. We’re not even sure we know how to love, much less do it online.

Whether it’s the developing relationship between family members who have barely met outside of a computer screen in Jessica Roy’s Sister in a Computer, the bond between Cassie Boorn and her son as a young mother, or the difficulties faced in maintaining a long distance relationship over the internet, these are complexities rather than fairy tales. Modern Love is pretty complicated, and not just on Facebook. Still, Facebook is pretty complicated, as Zach Subar will tell you in The End of the Affair. But even though things are different in this world of online dating services, love doesn’t always change. Parker Hu returns to contribute this issue’s poetry entry with Let’s Fall in Love.

Our mission at Millennials Magazine is to present the world as a new generation sees it: inexorably altered by technology, undergirded by social media and embedded into the internet. These things are no longer novel nor new; they simply exist as reality. They are us. How we relate to one another, not to mention ourselves, occurs through these omnipresent pathways and networks. This is the space that modern love finds itself in, struggling to pin down meaning in a world we all move quickly through. Take this publication as a snapshot, and compare it to your own view.

Got a different vision of modern love that we haven’t covered? Get in touch at Millennialsmag [at] Gmail.com. Otherwise, hit us up on our Facebook, through our Twitter account, or just check out the site. Our first issue, What is a Millennial?, can be found here. You can get in touch with me personally at Chaykak [at] Gmail.com, all complaints welcome. Please enjoy.

-Kyle Chayka

MM Founding Editor