Modern Love · The New York Times

The Secret to True Romance

February 11, 2026·39 min·2 clips

A listener's boyfriend heard about her secret wood-knocking ritual and asked: 'Can I make you a knocking block so you can take it with you anywhere?'

1. Modern Love (NYT) presents a Valentine's Day special combining listener voicemails about personal romantic moments with an interview with Albuquerque couple Lonnie Anderson and Anne Bolger Witherspoon. 2. Host Anna Martin hosts the episode; Lonnie Anderson and Anne Bolger Witherspoon are introduced as the 'king and queen of Valentine's Day' based on their 30-year tradition of elaborate public Valentines. 3. The episode's thesis is that romance shows up in radically different forms — from a man changing a tire mid-Zoom meeting to a planetarium reprogram — and the through-line is not scale but the quality of attention. 4. Listener stories include a man who was stationed in Hawaii while his future wife lived in New York, and a 38-year marriage in which the husband rubbed his wife's 'gnarly running feet' every night on the couch until he died. 5. A listener shares a story of being given a mamoul date cookie on a second date because he remembered she'd mentioned liking it on their first — a gesture that continued through every subsequent date, with cookies bought in bulk. 6. A partially deaf listener describes how their partner always silently ensures they are seated in the spot with best acoustic access in any room, without ever being asked — a habit the listener sometimes forgets until they notice it again. 7. One listener recounts waking up hot and fighting with a sweatshirt in the dark; her husband, half-asleep, reached over and held down her t-shirt so she could remove the sweatshirt without it coming off, then patted her back and went back to sleep. 8. Another listener confesses a lifelong wood-knocking superstition she'd hidden from her boyfriend John; when he caught her tapping the windowsill before bed, he listened to the explanation and then offered to build her a portable knocking block for travel. 9. A listener describes a first boyfriend slowly tracing freckles on her leg with his finger and saying: 'maybe if we connected the dots we could find all the constellations.' 10. A Valentine's story describes a couple who, after a fight, each independently went out and bought nearly identical white-flower bouquets as truce gestures, meeting at the door with matching flowers two years before the interview. 11. Lonnie Anderson's 30-year tradition has included: reprogramming the National Planetarium dome to read 'I love Anne'; projecting friends' Valentines on a 20-story building in Albuquerque; filling their street with reprinted signage reading 'I love Anne'; hiring the most famous chef in Albuquerque to cook in their kitchen while their daughter served as maitre d'. 12. His first Valentine, in the early years of their long-distance relationship, was converting Anne's apartment into a giant board game with oversized dice, ending at squares that prompted confessions like 'tell me something you're afraid of.' 13. Anne describes her initial skepticism about the scale of Lonnie's gestures, wondering 'when is it going to putter out,' before recognizing over successive years that the passion behind them was genuine. 14. Lonnie explains his driving philosophy: 'I'm not in charge of how much Anne loves me, but I am in charge of that I love her' — a distinction he says is what compels him to show up every year. 15. One Valentine involved Lonnie spending three to four weeks spelling out the entirety of e.e. cummings' poem 'I Carry Your Heart' in individual pebbles in his yard; neighbors looked over the fence wondering if he was mentally ill. 16. During the rock-poem project, one of Lonnie's daughters came outside, picked up a bucket of rocks, and began silently helping him spell out the poem for her mother — a moment Lonnie describes as confirming the Valentine would work. 17. Over 30 years, the Valentines have evolved from private gestures in their home to community events; strangers at Anne's high school reunion recognized her as 'that Anne,' and participants — including her sister who dressed as an 80s DJ for a prom recreation — now actively contribute. 18. Anne describes the shift to public romance as something she resisted at first but eventually accepted, framing her willingness to be surprised in public as 'a gift I can give back to Lonnie.' 19. Couples who find meaning in small daily attentions and people who believe romance is inseparable from community will find the most resonance here. 20. Listeners who find large performative gestures alienating or who want a single narrative arc rather than a collection of vignettes may find the episode's format diffuse.

As heard by us

A warm Valentine's episode about private memories, public gestures, and the rituals that keep romance alive.

The Secret to True Romance uses Valentine's Day to ask a plain, durable question: what counts as romance when it shows up in actual lives? Anna Martin gathers listener stories about gestures people still remember, then turns to Anne Bolger Witherspoon and Lonnie Anderson, whose…

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Why you'd press play

Thirty years of Valentine's Day carousels and cardboard flowers, and Lonnie Anderson is still going.

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