This is the story of how a cynic stopped worrying and learned to love love.

It started as an experiment by The New York Times in late 2004, a way to combine the now-trite advice column with reader response and a dash of romance, and has since become a sensation, topping the most-blogged and e-mailed charts weekly.

To be clear, "Modern Love" is not a practiced advice column or a section of reader response in the strictest sense of the phrase and is often not in the least bit romantic.

In many ways, however, it has given this writer a hope and an optimism that didn't previously exist.

The column is a weekly personal essay, submitted by a Times reader. And according to column editor Daniel Jones, "From a high school student in Seattle to a grandfather in Albany, these writers explore the complexities of love in all its forms, often through a contemporary lens."

Don't get me wrong: I'm not a "Chicken Soup for the Soul" type of person, nor am I the type that enjoys Nicolas Sparks novels or Meg Ryan/Kate Hudson/whoever that new perky blond is now RomComs. I call it "gentle cynicism." I've had girlfriends tell me I'm worse than their boyfriends.

On a particularly low Sunday morning, however, which I spent in my usual fashion — scouring the Web in my underwear, glasses and coffee cup askew, for some god-forsaken edu-fem-youth-literary-pop culture topic to write about for this column — I discovered "Modern Love."

That week's essay was titled "What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage" and revolved around a process by which a frustrated wife trained her husband exactly the way trainers condition dolphins.

"I began to analyze my husband the way a trainer considers an exotic animal," that week's columnist wrote. "The exotic animal known as Scott is a loner, but an alpha male. So hierarchy matters, but being in a group doesn't so much ... At home, I came up with incompatible behaviors for Scott to keep him from crowding me while I cooked. To lure him away from the stove, I piled up parsley for him to chop or cheese for him to grate at the other end of the kitchen island. Or I'd set out a bowl of chips and salsa across the room. Soon I'd done it: no more Scott hovering around me while I cooked."

Cheesy domestic economy aside, I nearly fell off my chair laughing at the idea of training my boyfriend like Flipper, and then laughed harder imagining if my training attempts met success. Who were these people baring their relational strife for an audience of millions? And what drove them to do so?

The answer, I found, is as nebulous as the stories themselves.

A few weeks later, an essay ran by a woman whose husband's personality had been drastically altered after extensive brain damage from a car accident. Even after rehabilitation, he fell into dangerous, unexplained rages.

She had him committed to a psychiatric facility and visits him on the weekends, tricking him to go back each time and explaining the tragic rhythm their lives have fallen into.

"How do I live with myself?" she wrote. "What kind of woman am I that I can leave my husband in this place? What about my wedding vows? Who am I that keeping hold of my own life is more important than taking care of my husband? But I can't take care of him. The truth is that no single person, no two people could take care of a man in Rich's condition."

The story grabbed me, particularly due to the fact that the scenario could happen to anyone.

I walked around for the rest of the day wondering, "What would I do?"

A gay man with AIDS returns home to care for his ailing mother. A woman who almost dies in a plane crash with her fiancé forgets how to interact with him. A woman widowed by Sept. 11 embarks on an affair. A man learns that he cannot give his wife children. A girlfriend who heartbreakingly admits she misses even the cancer-ridden sex she had with her boyfriend before he died.

These are all stories that have run in "Modern Love," and all stories that demonstrate the plurality of experience that is "love" today.

None of them include long walks on the beach, champagne on ice or a smooth jazz soundtrack, and perhaps that's why I've grown to need them: After all the saccharine indoctrination young girls receive about "true love," they actually resonate.

Perhaps the most controversial story, receiving hundreds of angry outpourings, involved a young college student dating a guy accused of rape who mourned what the ordeal had done to him and wrote:

"I'll always regret what might have been. His ordeal will always haunt me. In my mind, he was not seeking to humiliate and subjugate a woman on that night many years ago. I believe he was a boy who endeavored for hours in the dark to express his drunken, fumbling desire in a way that, fair or not, ended up unraveling his life. I wish he had found me first."

Like so many readers who read those words, I felt sick and conflicted and yet, empathetic.

Shakespeare said that love is "both a sickness and its cure" One wishes, for the sake of everyone's happiness, that this message would get out more.

The column challenges me. It pushes my boundaries. And it lifts me up when I need it the most. It is, in so many words, one of the better modern loves I've ever had.

Reach columnist Maureen Trantham at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu.