Since we're all hungry for things to listen to we wanted to drop some old episodes in your feed. Bestselling author Emma Straub's new book All Adults Here was released today and it is the perfect quarantine read about the very real messiness of family life. Way back in season one we interviewed Emma and her husband Mike about following their dreams and launching an independent book store. It's just a nice listen right now as a reminder that we can and will create beautiful things out of our dreams again soon. 

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When Caroline Wright was told she had a brain tumor that was so fatal doctors nicknamed it The Terminator and that she only had a year left to live she started writing…She began to write for her two young boys and for her husband Garth. She filled dozens of black and white marbled composition books.. And in those notebooks she wrote them a blueprint for what their lives might look like after she was gone. Writing just became this ritual, this hopeful landscape that was distanced from the craziness of being a patient. It gave Caroline this hopeful version of what motherhood and marriage could look like.

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Cecilia Latorre and her partner Gerry tried to blend their two families under one roof. But their children had very different lifestyles and everyone was unhappy. 

We often take for granted that living together is a hallmark of commitment. That couples must cohabitate if they’re serious about their relationship. But what if cohabitating actually makes the relationship worse? Cecilia and Gerry decided to stay together by purchasing separate houses that are side by side. They have their own bedrooms, their own bathrooms, their own lives…. and they’ve never been happier.

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Dr. David Fajgenbaum has been read his last rites five times. He suffers from the extremely rare and deadly Castleman disease, an orphan disease with no known cure or treatments. To buy himself more time to marry his college sweetheart Caitlin and start a family with her David embarked on a journey to find the cure and treatment for his disease on his own.

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Glennon Doyle was still married to the father of her three children when she saw Abby Wambach across a room and felt something that can only be described as love at first sight. Glennon didn’t think it would be possible to be with Abby, to be with a woman, to blow up the carefully curated life she had been taught she was supposed to have. But she did it anyway. And It wasn’t easy, because life isn’t easy or simple. But it was possible and once Glennon realized it was possible she began to live the truest and most beautiful version of her life. Glennon and Abby’s love story cracked our hearts right open and we couldn’t be happier to bring it to you to launch season four.

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Three stories of love and commitment in the age of COVID-19. A Maine doctor moves out of his house to protect his wife, toddler and unborn child from the virus. A local cardboard factory steps up to make cardboard cutouts of the 120 guests who won’t be at a young couple’s wedding. And one couple who got married without leaving their apartment...in the Nintendo video game Animal Crossing.

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Committed is back for season four on April 15th. We have ten new stories of love and marriage, hope and fear, failure and success and all the other messy parts of being a human in the world right now. This season on Committed we bring you a wife who tries to write her legacy for her husband and children after she’s diagnosed with a fatal brain tumor. We have the author and activist Glennon Doyle on leaving the husband of her three children for the love of her life, Abby Wambach. And we have a couple who tried so hard to blend their families and live together under one roof, but ultimately found that the secret of their success was in living apart...in houses next door to one another.

We've got these stories and much, much more, including what love and commitment looks like amidst the strangeness of a pandemic.

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We’ve gotten so many voicemails from you that we had to run another episode of three minute love stories. This week we have a couple trying to work through their changing marriage as they adopt a foster baby born to an addicted mother. Another couple picked up their entire life and moved to Bali to open a restaurant...and, finally, a wedding singer who fell in love with a bridesmaid.

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Today we have an update from an episode we did back in April of last year. In Season Two we talked to Samantha and her wife Laura. The two of them originally fell in love in college. They got married quickly and had four sons. Samantha was born a man, but always felt like something else, always felt like a woman. After thirteen years of marriage Samantha transitioned. When we spoke to Laura and Samantha they were navigating their new relationship as parents, partners and wives. It was an episode about what it takes to stand by your partner as your partner changes into a new person. But relationships are complicated. Marriage is complicated. Last summer the two women realized that they both needed something different from one another. I spoke to Samantha this month about what it is like now for her to navigate her life as a single lesbian woman.

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We have more little love stories for you...Three more stories that come from our own listeners. They’re short and sweet and all of them reminded us about the many ways we can commit to one another. In one a librarian meets a genuinely nice man online, in another moving into a camper van saves a couple’s relationship and finally two kids figure out how to make long distance work.

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