Modern Love · The New York Times

Andrew Garfield Wants to Crack Open Your Heart (Encore)

December 24, 2025·49 min·3 clips

Andrew Garfield argues that broken hearts don't need fixing—they expand through cracking open, citing 'onism' as the prison of living only one life.

Anna Martin opens by noting that the team is off for the holidays and that this encore was one of the most thoughtful, open-hearted conversations listeners connected with when it first ran in the fall of 2024. New episodes are set to return on January 7. The story starts in a rough season. The speaker says he was incredibly lonely, his bones ached, and all his plans had come to nothing after failing at marriage and work and having very little money to his name. Running into his ex-wife on the street made the rupture feel raw again. He also remembers stepping in when two boys were robbing an old Vietnamese man and then being turned on himself, which left him wondering whether part of him wanted to die. Eventually he moved back to the United States and took a job in a prison. There he met another inmate, Mike, a man with salt-and-pepper hair, huge biceps, and ridiculous glasses, carrying a folder of clippings and photocopied certificates. The folder showed a GED, a bachelor's degree, and prison program certifications, plus letters from counselors, chaplains, teachers, and supervisors who said they loved him. At first the speaker found the whole thing sad and could not read it closely because he was too wrapped up in his own losses. Mike talks about younger prisoners acting out because five years feels enormous when you are 20, and says he can get up smiling when he thinks of his sentence as moving him closer to the door. A month later, the speaker learns Mike has been locked up for more than 16 years and has at least eight more to go, having been arrested as a teenager and not due out until his mid-forties after raping the sheriff's daughter in his hometown. The episode does not excuse that offense. Instead, it stays with the uneasy fact that someone can be deeply harmful and still stir tenderness in the people around him. Anna Martin lets the discomfort breathe, returning again and again to loneliness, pity, anger, and the wish to stay open without losing accountability.

As heard by us

A searching Modern Love encore about loneliness, prison, harm, and the difficult work of keeping a heart open.

Modern Love's holiday encore turns on a hard, intimate passage about a man at a low point: a failed marriage, stalled work, money trouble, and a prison job that brings him into contact with Mike, an inmate whose thick folder of certificates and supportive letters cannot erase…

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Why you'd press play

You want a prison story that keeps asking you to sit with loneliness and moral unease.

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