As seen on Humans of New York, by Brandon Stanton
http://www.humansofnewyork.com/post/133411172546/13-id-just-broken-up-with-my-fiancée-in-may
(1/3) “I’d just broken up with my fiancée in May. She left for work one day and never came home, then she mailed me the engagement ring. I was going through a rough time. I’d recently gotten sober. I was managing to stay away from alcohol, but sometimes I’d have to look at my watch and just commit myself to five more minutes of sobriety. One morning I went to a coffee shop and saw they were promoting their hashtag. I was brand new to Instagram, so I was just figuring out how it worked. I typed in the hashtag, and I noticed a post from Whitney. Her hashtags seemed thoughtful, so I followed her.”
“At first I thought he might be a serial killer.”
http://www.humansofnewyork.com/post/133413710636/23-id-also-been-engaged-recently-we-broke-it
(2/3) “I’d also been engaged recently. We broke it off in January. I was trying to make some changes in my life. I stopped wearing make-up for a few months to see what sort of things I’d notice if I stopped looking in the mirror so much. I made a deal with myself that I wasn’t going to post any selfies for a while. I was only going to photograph things that weren’t me. I started posting photos of nature, art, and my teacup collection. That began to attract other people into my life who were interested in those things. One night Chris sent me a message. It was a photo of a bridge he’d just taken. We went back and forth for a couple weeks, then decided to meet. A few months earlier, I probably would have never agreed to meet. But I was at a point in my life where I was trying to be open to new things. I told him my only rule was that he couldn’t murder me.”
“And my only rule was that she had to wear her cat glasses.”
http://www.humansofnewyork.com/post/133421649486/33-we-met-for-a-couple-hours-and-decided-to
(3/3) “We met for a couple hours, and decided to go on a picnic the following week. Our goal was to get on his boat, find a random island, and have a picnic. We were out for about an hour when the sky started getting very dark. We decided to keep going. It started pouring. We jumped in the water and hid under the front of the boat. The rain was cold but the water felt like a bathtub. He took this photo of me and sent me an enlargement. When I got home that night, I started writing him letters. I wrote him one letter per day, but I saved them all, and recently I gave him all seventy of them. The first was from the day on the boat. The last line was: ‘And happiness was everywhere that day.’”
