A Foreword by Roxane Gay

To introduce No Ordinary Love, Roxane Gay shares her own perfectly imperfect love story.

If you were to ask my wife Debbie the story of how we met, she would tell you a rather charming and romantic story of persistence and pursuit with a woman who didn’t realize she was being persistently pursued until after the fact. It took more than a year, and it was only when she finally emailed me and asked if she could take me out on a “proper date,” that I understood her intentions.

If you were to ask me the story of how my wife and I met, some of the details would be the same, but many would be different, because that’s how love works. I was clueless and then, when I finally got that fateful email, I was so charmed by the phrase “proper date,” that I wrote back and said, “Sure.” In retrospect, I am not at all certain how we managed a successful first date given the brevity of my reply, but here we are.

We met first at a book event I was doing and after, we went to dinner at a midtown steakhouse. I picked the restaurant, and as we walked in, it was loud and crowded. There was live music, and you could barely hear yourself think above the din. I immediately regretted my choice and worried that the evening was going to be a disaster as we shouted across the table at each other. At one point, I spilled water on Debbie, and I wilted inside because any chance of seeming cool vanished, instantly.

But then, and this is where our stories are the same, we had a lovely time, made plans for a second date and, on the street outside the restaurant, before we parted ways, Debbie asked if she could kiss me and I said yes and then we did and it was spectacular.

Nearly seven years later, we write our love story every day as we build and nurture a life together. And that story is stronger because, in the beginning, we had our individual stories and our unique perceptions of every word exchanged, every gesture made, every moment of connection. And still, we were able to navigate the tender anxieties of early romance and hold on to the new relationship, reaching for each other across the bridge between the stories she was telling herself and the stories I was telling myself, the obstacles of time and distance, and the occasional misunderstandings.

That’s what successful dating is — two people finding a way to tell a shared story that can blossom alongside the histories we bring into new relationships, the doubts and fears and hopes and yearnings we carry with us. The five couples featured in No Ordinary Love were all willing to risk diving into the unknown when they matched on Hinge. They had enough hope to believe something promising was on the horizon. They made connections, even as the people in each couple were telling themselves very different stories about their shared experiences. And now, they are writing perfectly imperfect stories together.