摩登情爱 第二季

这一季最后一集讲述了一个重拾旧爱的故事，一对离异夫妻再次尝试约会给彼此一个机会，但现实远比影视作品还有戏剧性。

当过去的激情和炙热又重回脑海，这对曾在婚姻中失败的两个中年人陷入了甜蜜的恋爱中，在原文作者Mary Elizabeth Williams刚在脸书上发布了“这是有史以来最好的夏天”的第二天，她得知了自己患有癌症，恶性黑色素瘤。

以下为纽约时报在2014年3月刊登的原文：

我看着我约会对象的餐桌对面，一个迷人的棕色眼睛男人，带着两个年幼的孩子和一段破裂的婚姻，他讲述了他的浪漫史。

“我曾经认为我生活中的关系部分已经解决了，我从来不必担心它，”他告诉我。“现在我想，如果你爱一个人，你必须一天一天地接受它。而且你必须一天一天地工作。” 他的眼中闪过一丝希望。

我微笑着想：“我可以和这样的男人谈恋爱。” 事实上，我知道我可以，因为我曾嫁给了他。在这个晚上，在我们认输很久之后，我们又来了，爬回了擂台。不过这一次，情况就不一样了。我们只是从未想过它会变得多么不同，或者变得如此迅速。

我们的解体并不是一场迅速、决定性的灾难，而是一系列同样具有破坏性的较小力量。我们像许多夫妻一样分道扬镳：通过逐渐意识到我们不快乐，以及不可避免的结论，即我们的关系不是我们不快乐的避难所，而是导致不快乐的原因。我们是两个曾经深深相爱的好人，但在将近 20 年后发现自己不再相爱了。

在接下来的 40 年里，我们都不想像过去一样，这段婚姻内看似稳定，但却缺乏了最重要的一部分。如果我们没有孩子，事情会很简单。毫无疑问，我们会友好地分手，但完全从彼此的生活中消失。但我们确实有孩子。

正如我的朋友琳达（她的丈夫在她怀孕期间离开了她）曾经告诉我的那样：“无论如何，这是一生的关系。我会参加我儿子的婚礼，我的前任也会参加。”

同样，对我们来说，我们曾经分享的善意，加上我们对女儿的爱，从来没有任何疑问，比我们目前对彼此的任何失望都更强烈。我们在学校戏剧和家长教师会议上坐在一起。我们共享假期和生日。我们甚至在同一栋楼里租了另一套公寓，让孩子们的情况更轻松。过了一段时间，分手的伤口愈合了，形成了新的友谊，这是为人父母独有的纽带。

长期婚姻的终结，尤其是有孩子的婚姻，会动摇你的世界的根基。如果你很幸运，你最终会更勇敢、更聪明地走出困境。分手后不久，我意识到我喜欢我内心的新人，这种心碎正在锻造。

我没想到的是，我也喜欢他成为的那个人。然后有一天他说了一些有趣的话，我笑了，然后他用我从未见过的直接看着我说：“如果你没有注意到，我正在和你调情。”

对于一个会甜言蜜语的男人，我一直很吃这一套。所以我对他的调情进行了回应。当他请我吃饭时，我答应了。

不久之后，我和我的朋友莉莉（Lily）在博物馆里闲逛，莉莉是一位女士，她在分居一年后最近与丈夫和解。“你怎么知道？” 我问她。“你经历了这一切之后，怎么又相信了？”

“他说了我想听的话，”她说，“尽管直到他说出来我才知道我需要听什么。你会看到的。”

不久之后，我和孩子们的父亲约会了。

我们的重逢，尽管低调且不留痕迹，我们仍在朋友和家人中引起了各种反应。有浪漫主义者的热烈欢呼，也有其他人的怀疑和担忧，他们记得我们解体的所有悲惨细节。但分手后再次坠入爱河并不是退缩的简单事情。我们已经不是我们二十年前相遇时的样子，我们不想重温一段婚姻，就我们最近的记忆而言，这段婚姻已经明确地失败了。

然而，如果我们已经采取了结束长期关系所需的信念的飞跃，当然，我们认为，我们可以鼓起更大的信任，再次敞开心扉。此外，和一个我能真正理解他疯狂前任带来的情感包袱的男人在一起真是太好了。我的孩子们对妈妈的新男人很高兴。

紧接着那个夏天，我们又开始了一段慵懒的日子和温柔的夜晚的幸福时光。然后它进行了严重的转向。8 月10日，我更新了我的Facebook状态，上面写着“有史以来最好的夏天”。8 月11日，我得知我患有恶性黑色素瘤。

几天后，当我躺在医院里，腮部掺杂，三个手术部位流血，希望我没有癌症时，他和我手拉着手在电视上观看“哈利波特与火焰杯”。

“我为这一切感到抱歉，”我昏昏沉沉地说，“因为现在你必须坚持我。否则我们所有的朋友都会认为你是纽特·金里奇（Newt Gingrich，美国议员）。”

“我看你一直有这个计划，”他说。“打的好。” 但后来，当我告诉他我知道这不是他心目中的重逢时，他只是笑着说：“这次你没有那么容易摆脱我。”

当我在随后的黯淡时期中恢复过来时，经过严峻的重新诊断，预测我只能活几个月，然后进入临床试验，彻底根除我的疾病使我们震惊，他做饭并洗衣服。他为孩子们安排了玩耍时间，给他们读故事。他为我取药，清理伤口，每天他要收拾的的血液多到估计让伊莱·罗斯（Eli Roth，美国恐怖片导演）看到都会害怕。他让我对他从未见过的力量感到敬畏。我从来没有必要这样做。

我们的关系由于其作为再度约会而已经达到了苦乐参半的边缘，但没有什么比一起穿越绞索更能消除你们约会中的懵懂与试探(take that whole skipping-through-the-daisies aspect out of your dates，我实在不会翻这句)。虽然我们的经历远非性感，但它特别浪漫。

没有人会写关于坐在浴缸边缘上的歌曲，而一个男人会在你渗出的皮肤移植物上涂抹局部抗生素。没有诗意的颂歌是写给那些有着巨大伤疤的女人的，也没有写给可能连续第三天穿着同一件衬衫的男人的十四行诗。

但也许应该有，因为我认为我在24岁时所知道的关于爱情的一切现在看起来都很荒谬。那时我不知道一段美好的关系有一天会变得不可持续。我无法想象，后来，奇怪的是，它会变成一种新的美妙。

很久以前我如此乐观地戴在手指上的结婚戒指，也是多年后我沮丧地取下的那枚，现在已经永久退役了。但我手上戴着一颗小小的月光石，象征着希望。希望以各种形式治愈。

我们都不再有保障地看待这个世界。我们认为它们是令人欣慰的小说。我们承认，当您刚刚超过饮酒年龄时，您无法始终信守承诺。你不知道你会如何改变，也不知道生活会给你带来什么。

我们的婚姻破裂了，疾病进来了，并且非常努力地想杀死我，这消除了我们对未来看起来和过去一样的舒适假设，但有更多的笑声。但他和我已经学会了，因为我们不得不，安全的幻觉和当下的解放快乐，义务和选择之间的区别。

选择，尽管它可能很可怕，但要好得多。我们不得不离开彼此才能发现：了解决定与一个人在一起的真正含义，一天一天，无论可能有多少天。爱情不是堡垒。这不是一个上锁的房间。它充满了门窗和逃生舱口，它们并不可怕。用莱昂纳德·科恩（Leonard Cohen，出生于加拿大的著名歌手）的话来说，它们就是光线进入的方式。

几周前，经过一轮筋疲力尽的检查和医生预约后，我们一起倒在床上，几乎累得说不出话来。我们看着吊扇旋转，被它的催眠节奏所迷惑，直到最后他只说了六个字：“我很高兴我没有失去你。”

我看着我爱的男人，那个我曾经离开过的男人，对我说：“我很高兴我也没有失去你。”

以下为英文原文：

A Second Embrace, With Hearts and Eyes Open

By Mary Elizabeth Williams

I looked across the restaurant table at my date, an attractive brown-eyed man with two young children and a broken marriage, as he recounted his romantic history.

“I used to think the relationship part of my life was settled and I never had to worry about it,” he told me. “Now I think, if you love someone, you have to take it one day at a time. And you have to work at it one day at a time.” There was a hopeful gleam in his eye.

I smiled and thought, “I could be in a relationship with a man like this.” In fact, I knew I could. Reader, I had married him. On this night, long after we had thrown in the towel on us, here we were again, crawling back into the ring. This time, though, it would be different. We just never imagined how different it would become, or how quickly.

Our unraveling had not been a swift, decisive catastrophe but a smaller series of no less destructive forces. We came apart the way many couples do: via the gradual realization that we were unhappy, and the inescapable conclusion that our relationship was not a refuge from our unhappiness but a cause of it. We were two nice people who had been deeply in love but who found themselves, nearly 20 years later, in love no more.

Neither of us wanted to spend the next 40 years going on as we had, seemingly safe within an institution but deprived of its most essential nutrient. If we had not had children, it would have been simple. We no doubt would have disappeared amicably but entirely from each other’s lives. But we did have children.

As my friend Linda, whose husband left her while she was pregnant, once told me: “No matter what, it’s a lifetime relationship. I’ll be at my son’s wedding and my ex will be there.”

Likewise for us, there was never any question that the good will we had once shared, combined with our love for our daughters, was stronger than any current disappointment we could harbor toward each other. We sat together at school plays and parent-teacher conferences. We shared holidays and birthdays. We even took another apartment in the same building, to make the situation easier for the children. After a while, the wounds of the breakup healed, and a new friendship was formed, a bonding unique to the front lines of parenthood.

The end of a long marriage, especially a marriage with children, will shake your world to its foundation. If you’re lucky, you’ll eventually come out of it a little braver and wiser. It wasn’t long after the split that I realized I liked the new person inside of me that this heartbreak was forging.

What I hadn’t expected was that I’d like the person he was becoming, too. Then one day he said something funny and I laughed, and then he looked at me with a directness I had never seen before and said, “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m flirting with you.”

I’ve always been a sucker for a man with a smooth line. So I flirted back. And when he asked me to dinner, I said yes.

A short time later I strolled through a museum with my friend Lily, a woman who had recently reconciled with her husband after a yearlong separation. “How did you know?” I asked her. “How did you believe again, after everything you’d been through?”

“He said what I needed to hear,” she said, “even though I didn’t know what I needed to hear until he said it. You’ll see.”

Soon after that I went on a date with the father of my children, and over a plate of plantains, I did see.

Our reunion, low key and unmarked by flying rice though it was, prompted a variety of responses among our friends and family. There were enthusiastic cheers from the romantics, and there was skepticism and concern from others, who remembered all the miserable details of our unraveling. But falling in love again after a breakup is no simple matter of retreat. We are not the people we were when we met two decades before, and we had no desire to relive a marriage that had, to the best of both our recent memories, failed unequivocally.

Yet if we had taken the leap of faith it takes to end a long-term relationship, surely, we figured, we could muster the even greater trust it would take to open our hearts again. Besides, it was nice being with a man whose emotional baggage from his crazy ex I could really understand. And my children were happy about Mom’s new man.

What ensued that summer we began again was a blissful period of lazy days and tender nights. Then it took a severe swerve. On Aug. 10, I had updated my Facebook status to read, “Best summer ever.” On Aug. 11, I learned I had malignant melanoma.

As I lay in a hospital a few nights later, doped to the gills, bleeding from three surgical sites and hoping I was clear of cancer, he and I held hands and watched “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” on TV.

“I’m sorry about all this,” I said groggily, “because now you have to stick with me. Otherwise all our friends will think you’re Newt Gingrich.”

“I see you had this planned all along,” he said. “Well played.” But later, when I told him I knew this wasn’t the reunion he’d had in mind, he just chuckled and said, “You’re not getting rid of me that easily this time.”

As I recovered through the bleak period that followed, through a grim rediagnosis that left me with a prognosis of mere months to live and then into a clinical trial that shocked us by eradicating my disease entirely, he cooked dinners and did laundry. He arranged playdates for the children and read them stories. He picked up prescriptions and cleaned up enough blood to make Eli Roth shudder. He left me awed at a strength in him I had never seen before. I had never had to.

Our relationship already had attained a bittersweet edge by virtue of its status as a second go-round, but there’s nothing like journeying through the wringer together to take that whole skipping-through-the-daisies aspect out of your dates. Although our experience has been far from sexy, it has been peculiarly romantic.

Nobody writes songs about sitting on the edge of the tub while a man applies topical antibiotics to your oozing skin graft. There are no poetic odes to women with gaping scars, no sonnets to men who may be wearing the same shirt for the third day in a row.

But maybe there should be, because everything I thought I knew about love at 24 seems pretty absurd now. I didn’t know then that a wonderful relationship would one day become unsustainable. I couldn’t have imagined that later on, strangely enough, it would become a new kind of wonderful.

The wedding ring I so optimistically slipped onto my finger long ago, the same one I despondently removed many years later, is now permanently retired. But I wear a small moonstone on my hand, the symbol of hope. Hope for healing in all its forms.

Neither of us sees the world in guarantees anymore. We recognize them as the comforting fictions they are. We accept that you can’t always keep the promises you made when you were barely above drinking age. You can’t know how you will change, or what life will throw at you.

Having our marriage fall apart and having disease come in and try very hard to kill me did away with our cozy assumptions that the future looks just like the past, but with more laugh lines. But he and I have learned, because we have had to, the difference between the illusion of security and the liberating joy of the present, between obligation and choice.

And choice, terrifying as it can be, is so much better. We had to leave each other to discover that: to understand what it really means to decide to be with a person, one day at a time, however many days there may be. Love isn’t a fortress. It isn’t a locked room. It’s full of doors and windows and escape hatches, and they’re not scary. They’re how, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, the light gets in.

A few weeks ago, after an exhausting round of tests and doctor appointments, we flopped together into bed, almost too tired to speak. We watched the ceiling fan spin, lulled by its hypnotic rhythm, until at last he spoke just six words: “I’m glad I didn’t lose you.”

I looked into semidarkness at the man I love, the man I once left, and said, “I’m glad I didn’t lose you, too.”

无剧透点评：Modern Love，现代情感故事

单集剧评： 告别后就要学会放手，然后开车兜兜风吧

幕后访谈：摩登情爱背后的故事，纽约时报对主创的采访