The Modern Love column debuted 20 years ago this month — on Halloween, scarily enough — with a story by a lifelong bachelor, Steve Friedman, who was trying to feel OK about being dumped. He wrote: “She dumped me. What’s important are not the details but the pronoun placement, ‘she’ preceding ‘me.’ But there is no villain here. My therapist suggests I repeat this mantra to myself. So I do. There is no villain here.”

So began my editorship of this intimate, emotional space, where every week I talk to strangers about some of the most perplexing and devastating experiences in their lives and then publish their stories for the world to read. It is an odd mix of the oh-so-private and the couldn’t-be-more-public. The effect can be validating, squirm-inducing, instructive, revelatory.

All Modern Love essays fall into one (or more) of three categories: finding love, losing love, and trying to keep love alive. Conveniently, our three most popular columns perfectly represent each of those. Even if you’re not familiar with Modern Love, there’s a good chance you’ve heard about one of them.

In the first, published way back in 2006, Amy Sutherland explored using exotic animal training techniques on her husband to try to keep their love alive in “What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage.” She overpraised her husband like a sea lion in training for putting his dirty clothes in the hamper and changed his feeding patterns in the kitchen by moving the salsa from the counter to the table, among other techniques. And it worked. Their marriage improved.

In 2015, Mandy Len Catron and an acquaintance asked each other 36 intimate questions to try to expedite the process of falling in love in “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This.” The questions — which you can read here — start easy: “Would you like to be famous?” But they quickly go deep: “What is your most terrible memory?” “How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?” Then you’re supposed to stare into each other’s eyes for four minutes, which Mandy and her friend did. And they fell in love! After the essay was published, so did a lot of other people. We were flooded with messages from readers crediting those questions for their new relationships, marriages or deepened friendships.

A few years after that, Amy Krouse Rosenthal, who had terminal cancer and was near death, wrote “You May Want to Marry My Husband” — an essay that served as a kind of dating profile for her husband in the hope that he would find love after she was gone. “He is a sharp dresser,” she writes, with “a flair for fabulous socks. He is fit and enjoys keeping in shape.” Amy and I edited her essay while she was in hospice, and she died 10 days after it was published.