Introducing the No Ordinary Love Audiobook

With a special foreword by Hunter Harris about the power of saying how you feel out loud.

For better or for worse, I go through a ritual every time I send a risky, vulnerable text where I’m putting myself (and my feelings) on the line: I send drafts of it to various friends (always in different neighborhoods or on different coasts), think about sending it, plan to send it, rewrite it entirely, and get feedback on that revision. The first draft is not meaningfully different from the ninth, but somewhere between drafts four and eight I become so irritated with my own emotionality that I finally have a suitable level of remove. At this point, I think, whatever. It is what it is.

I send the text, put my phone face-down, and quickly find a movie or walk my dog or take a shower — anything to distance myself from whatever I’ve just shared, whatever feelings I’ve just laid bare. Oh, that text? That was written by five-minutes-ago-me, a different me, a woman I’m unfamiliar with, a previous me, and I’m not defined by my past. :)

The minute I share my emotions I want to disown them. I hate to let a feeling linger in the in-between, in that canyon between what I say and what the other person’s thinking, between what they reply and my own insecurity. I’d rather sit in the middle seat of an international flight than have a visible feeling, than let someone know my own emotional needs. (Divorced parents, Leo, clinical anxiety, criminal screentime.) I can claim to be obsessed with logic, but what’s more practical than knowing how someone else feels? What’s more clarifying than knowing, than having the conversation so you no longer have to wonder?

But there’s so much on the other side of being too forward, of being awkward, of letting it all hang out. What makes me so terrified of telling someone how I feel, even though I’ve never once regretted it? I’m happy I told the guy who annihilated my Leo season when he bailed on my open-bar birthday party that I needed some space because I wanted to be more than friends. (I needed that distance! I’m glad I asked for it!) My last relationship began because a boy clearly, and sincerely, asked for clarity. I wish there was an easy way to say, “I like seeing you more than I like seeing anyone else” — if there is, please tell me — but that’s the only way I could get to what I’ve got going on right now. (Relationship status: pleasantly seeing someone who likes watching Housewives and says my Criterion Collection account proves I “know ball.”)

The five Hinge couples who found love in this year’s collection of No Ordinary Love stories didn’t trip into romance; they talked about it. In different ways, they were all willing to be honest with themselves and with each other. To have the difficult conversation, even when it felt clumsy. The payoff for a vulnerable confession, an awkward miscommunication, or a set of stated boundaries was the potential for a relationship full of honesty and trust. Each partner made the terrifying decision to say what they wanted and what they were looking for, even when it felt hard.

My therapist, smarter than me and better at sussing out my emotions, calls saying the thing “gathering information.” Saying the thing can feel daunting, forming the sentences can be clunky, being honest can feel impossible. “Gathering information” is pleasingly clinical, pleasantly impersonal. Dating has a hundred microguidelines, a dozen invisible rules unique to every person. Is that what makes saying the thing so hard, knowing how easily I can decide that some quality or habit is disqualifying? Maybe I will violate someone’s list of icks, trip over their boundaries, ram into their guidelines. But maybe I won’t — saying the thing is the only way I’ll find out.

And as I’m learning, one cringe conversation after another, saying the thing is a way of building a relationship rather than retreating from a relationship. Do you like me? Do you want more of me? Are you as afraid of this as I am? Those questions can feel big and scary in my mind and in my heart, but I really don’t want to be in a relationship with someone who doesn’t want to ask them or answer them. (I’ve done that before and eventually we weren’t just on different pages; we were in different genres.) Every meaningful relationship I’ve had or envied began because someone was scared to say something real, but did it anyway.