Committed

Many of our committed guests have become like family to us. We've stayed in touch and  followed their journeys. Some of the pairs have stayed together and some haven't. That's the cycle of commitment. Love doesn't have to last forever to be beautiful and to contribute to our lives. When we first met Samantha (episode SUDDENLY SAMANTHA), she had just transitioned.  After 13 years of marriage, Samantha and her wife, Laura, we're adju...

This is the first of one of our BEST OF COMMITTED episodes. We're going to be compiling different shows on various themes in the hopes of both inspiring you and perhaps starting a conversation.  One of the things that's amazed me about the couples on this show is the ability for love and commitment to withstand some of the worst tragedies that you could ever imagine. And it's these episodes that have personally given me hope in som...

What makes a great marriage, or even a good marriage? Today we're talking to Frances Mayes, bestselling author of the mega-hit novel Under the Tuscan Sun which has been a touchpoint for women going through any kind of life change or reinvention for nearly 30 years. Now Frances has a new novel called A Great Marriage, to which she brings a lifetime of wisdom from her own two marriages and her parents' tumultuous union. I adore this ...

What happens when you meet the right person at the wrong time? In this heartwarming episode, Nina and Mario recount their love story that began with a chance meeting in Central Park in 1999. From exchanging shy hellos to an unexpected reunion two decades later, their romance is straight out of a movie. Discover how they reconnected after years apart, overcame personal challenges, and are now planning the adventure of a lifetime tog...

Casey and Steven met on a study abroad program in Morocco when they were juniors in college. After school they traveled to Beijing to teach English and then to Mali to live in Timbuktu. Travel does something to a relationship. It creates intimacies and speeds up the way we learn about one another. Now, two decades later, Casey and Steven have opened an Inn together in the Catskills, they have two daughters and they have found a sen...

Today we have a very special episode of the podcast Love Letters in our feed. Ever since Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey was a kid, music has played a major role in her life. “Eye of the Tiger” got her pumped for basketball games. She caught sets from Joan Baez and Melissa Etheridge working as a cocktail waitress. When she came out in her early 20s, she found solace in the Indigo Girls. These days, the governor uses music to center...

Jessica found out her husband Steve was gay a year and a half into her marriage. They broke up, got back together and tried to make it work because they were living in a very conservative Christian community. And in the midst of it all she met Matt and fell hard for him. Eventually Jessica and Matt got together and today they work with Jessica's ex-husband Steve on a podcast.

They share stories of love, marriage, coming out, divorce...

For the past five years, Alex and Christina had been running a bookstore that is both their primary income as a couple and their passion.  They opened A Novel Idea, bookshop in Philly, a year before the pandemic hit. And when the city closed all of its stores, they had to completely rethink everything about their small business.  They had no one to lean on, but one another. For better. Or worse. This is a story about perseverance a...

Molly and Ash met when Molly was in her late thirties, newly separated from her husband and the mother of a four year old. She was just started to explore her sexuality and wasn’t looking for anything serious. But you know what they say…make plans and the universe laughs. Molly and Ash fell in love and quickly knew they wanted to be together, but that meant navigating how to blend a family and reconciling the fact that Ash wanted t...

Manny struggled with porn addiction for years. He told himself that when he met the right woman he would be done. Then he met Becca and knew she was the one. But the night before his wedding he was still watching porn and he was so far gone in his addiction that he couldn't perform sexually on his wedding night. Manny and Becca struggled with Manny's porn addiction for years until both of them finally reached a breaking point. This...

The FBI came to Carl and Amy Nelson's house in the middle of the pandemic. That's when Carl found out that he was under investigation for a federal crime.  Over the next two years, the couple had most of their money and assets seized by the government.  What wasn't taken, they had to sell to pay for lawyers.

They lived in constant fear of the FBI returning one morning and arresting Carl in front of their four daughters.  And to this...

In 2006 Lee Woodruff got the phone call that no wife ever wants to get. Her husband Bob, then the co-anchor of ABC World News Tonight, had been hit by a roadside bomb in Iraq. In the explosion of rocks and metal, Bob was critically injured, sustaining shrapnel wounds to the head.

He was evacuated to Bethesda Maryland where he was put into a medically induced coma for five weeks to allow his brain to heal. Bob and Lee had already bee...

In April of 2020 the writer Amy Bloom traveled to Switzerland to help her husband Brian die with dignity before he was plunged into the long term suffering of living with a dementing disease. She writes about their late in life romance and how she helped Brian to end his life in her gorgeous memoir In Love. This story hits close to home for any of us who have ever watched a loved one suffer and felt helpless to try to alleviate the...

Last fall Renee moved from Singapore to Los Angeles to be with her partner April. April calls it a grand gesture and it certainly is. But it was confusing to a lot of people because Renee and April aren't in a romantic relationship. At all. And yet they do consider themselves life partners. The two women have been best friends since they were teenagers and they now consider themselves platonic life partners. But our society doesn't...

On their first date Tony Dokoupil said to Katy Tur, "So, we both have crazy parents."  This was wildly refreshing for Katy to hear and for Tony to say at the start of a relationship. Any of you with crazy parents will understand how much easier it is to be with someone who also has an unorthodox family.  As she recounts in her stunning new NY Times bestselling memoir Rough Draft, Katy's parents were the first helicopter news pilots...

For Mike Comforto, the worry and the anxiety over his infant son completely took over his life and his marriage. He was constantly convinced that the baby was in near fatal danger and those fears only intensified when he and his wife Nicole had a second child. Once he was having panic attacks and anxiety episodes every single day Mike was diagnosed with OCD and his road to recovery was a long process that is still ongoing today. Th...

Renee Montgomery is a basketball legend. She won two WNBA championships with the Minnesota Lynx. Today she's a part owner and Vice President of the WNBA team the Atlanta dream and a social justice activist. Renee talks a lot about the many, many ways that basketball has changed her life, including getting to meet her wife, the singer Sirena Grace. Meeting Sirena at an Atlanta Hawks game completely changed Renee's life in myriad way...

Sarah and Eric became foster parents in the hopes of one day adopting. And when baby Coco came into their lives it looked like it could be for good. But that wasn't the case. Caring for Coco became much messier, more challenging and more difficult than Eric and Sarah ever expected, mainly due to the fact that the foster system continually told them that they would likely be able to adopt Coco and then completely blindsided Sarah an...

Erin and Jason's third date ended with Jason falling off of a roof and ending up in the hospital with a major spinal cord injury that left him in a wheelchair. The two of them have only been on a few dates, but both of them had felt a serious connection, maybe even the beginnings of love. But neither of them knew what could or should happen after an accident that completely changed Jason's life.

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