“Love is hard work,” Rob starts to say, before Marge adds, “It’s going through decades together and somehow not hating each other. Or at least, tolerating each other enough that you can still live under the same roof.”

Both Rob and Gemma burst out laughing.

“Fifty percent of American couples don’t make it this far.” Rob makes the sign of the cross. “Lord have mercy. Did we get lucky! Whatever happened to ‘till death do us part’?”

He looks at the ceiling as if asking the question to God himself.

“It’s because women don’t have to keep being married to men they don’t like anymore, you big doofus,” Marge says. “We can make money now. And escape if we want to.”

“Well!” Rob exclaims loudly, making Celeste startle. “Then I guess I better treat you twice as good as I already do so you won’t run away from me!”

Marge smiles. “Oh, hush, you already treat me plenty well enough.”

When the final couple for “Modern Love in Focus,” Keiko and Nat, enters the studio, Celeste freezes. Her eyes remain fixed on Keiko, and in that moment, it occurs to Celeste that she’s never seen a queer Asian elder before, and definitely not one who is sapphic like her. Most of the other queer people she knows are around her age or younger, and the few older individuals she knows are not Asian. It’s a realization that sends her reeling, reminding her of a conversation she had with Min-joon while he was visiting over the holidays.

After hanging out with her friends in LA, they’d gone back to her place to have some barbecued pork belly and a bottle of soju. A few shots in, he’d randomly said, “You know, I’ve never heard anyone say they have a gay harabeoji or even a gay samchon. Have you?”

“No,” Celeste had replied. “You just never hear that sort of thing in Korea.”

Unlike her LA friends, who openly talked about their queer relatives, Min-joon and her other friends back home never mentioned having a gay grandpa or even a gay uncle, or any queer relatives at all.

“It’s the culture difference,” Min-joon had said. “It’s not like Korean queers don’t exist. We exist. But a lot of people remain closeted and live with the wife or husband they hate, more so than they do here. Let’s not do that.”

In the present, Celeste’s hands slightly tremble as she gets Keiko and Nat set up. She takes a few pictures of them before she begins the recording, making sure to capture every detail. The matching laugh lines on Keiko’s and Nat’s faces. Keiko’s wrinkly, golden hands resting on Nat’s dark brown ones.

When they begin the interview, the couple talks about how they met in the seventies while Nat was an exchange student in Tokyo.