I'll probably never be the world's greatest romantic—maybe the most hopeless, but that could be an honorable designation—and organized religion and I have long had a tenuous relationship. Nevertheless I do believe in angels, and wrote as much quite some time ago in a graduate essay entitled “Ephemera: On the Effects of Love and Angels.” This was the crux of my theory: “Whether mythic or human, angels are catalysts to change.”

Angels need not have wings or glowing halos; neither must they sound trumpets or carry flaming sabers. In my world's paradigm, angels pop in, then vanish, and in their wake we know we'll never be the same. We never forge much of a relationship with them, but their imprint is undeniable, for they affect our faith in whatever we believe—for better or worse, and usually the former.

Let me tell you a story:

Stanley was a homeless man I met years ago near my family's home in Los Angeles. He hailed from Yonkers, but was down on his luck and moved out to stay with his brother. He told me things had fallen through, so he Stanley was bearded, unkempt, and backon the street. At least this time he was in L.A., where it was comparably warm.

Sitting in a coffee shop near UCLA, Stanley looked like he could have used some company, so I joined him. He laid out his basic biography, but when I mentioned how his story moved me, he said, “Everyone doesn't have a story—everyone has a life.”

What Stanley meant was this: details matter. Broad swaths do, too, but color inhabits the short strokes. The religious find God there; the secular and artistic see infinite beauty. And writers—well, we find inspiration everywhere there is a story. There lies a cornucopia of anecdotes just below the surface of everyday consciousness, squirming to be told. I never met Stanley again, and it's been nearly a decade. But in the span of fifteen minutes, he—angelically—taught me to empathize.

One of humanity's gifts is our ability to bring relationships to language through poetry, prose, and rhetoric. Without language, our relationships would have no consequence, no history, no appreciation, and they would die in time. Without language, we'd have no magazine, no Relationships Issue.

It was only a very short time ago that I forgave Elie Wiesel, renowned author of Night, for receiving the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize yet instead of my grandparents. All had survived the Holocaust; so why should his name be immortalized more popularly than theirs?

The fact is that while my grandparents and their friends, family and so many strangers have stories to tell, Wiesel found a way to put his past down on paper concisely and empathetically. Wiesel transmitted the atrocities he had lived so that his readers could cry, too.

In this issue, we celebrate the adjectives that describe our complex relationships: familial, romantic, spiritual, political, residential, personal, and sexual. My chief hope is that you’ll find such ruminations identifiable and, of course, moving.