The No Ordinary Love audiobook, Hinge‘s annual collection of real love stories, has returned for a second year, and this time Rufi Thorpe, author of Margo’s Got Money Troubles, has written a story told entirely from the point of view of a cat. That is not the strangest thing about it. The strangest, and most affecting thing, is that almost all of it actually happened.
The No Ordinary Love Audiobook and the Weight of Real Stories
The premise of No Ordinary Love is disarmingly simple: writers are given real couples, real courtships, real text messages, and asked to do something literary with them. This year’s collection features stories written and read by Raven Smith, Nicola Dinan, Tembe Denton-Hurst, Curtis Garner and Thorpe. The audiobook is available for free on Spotify, Libby, Libro.fm, Apple Audiobooks and Barnes & Noble Audiobooks, with a rollout to further platforms in the coming weeks. All five stories will also be available to read and listen to on Substack at no-ordinary-love.com from 10 August, according to the Hinge newsroom. The campaign itself was developed in partnership with Dazed Studio.
Thorpe’s contribution, This Is How to Touch Me, follows a real couple, Roisin and Daniel, through the early weeks of their relationship: a text exchange about ‘super lush kisses’, an ‘are we just casual?’ conversation (they were not, in fact, just casual), and a date themed around a hermaphroditic cat who had recently had kittens. That cat is the narrator. ‘The moment I heard about that cat,’ Thorpe says, ‘I was like, the cat is central.’
The decision to filter a love story through a grumpy feline is not merely whimsical. Writing from a real couple’s perspective presented what Thorpe describes as an ‘horrifying’ challenge, the obligation of fidelity to someone else’s experience. The cat’s point of view is an invention, she concedes, but the cat itself is very real, and in fiction, she observes, ‘you’re limited by how much the reader can believe. You wind up saying, oh well, that’s too much, even if it’s based on a story you heard.’ Their story was, she says, ‘so unique and crazy and beautiful’ that she worried readers would doubt it. The animal narrator gives her a frame: an observer who can roam the scene without claiming ownership of it.
Vulnerability as the Admission Fee
Thorpe is in conversation throughout with Grant Ginder, author of So, Old, So Young, and the exchange between them has the ease of people who came to friendship through a cold DM. Ginder sent the opening message, asking whether Thorpe would be his conversation partner at a reading in Los Angeles. ‘With my thumbs trembling and my tail between my legs,’ he says. She replied: ‘Wild horses couldn’t stop me.’
That story is, in miniature, exactly what No Ordinary Love is about. ‘Vulnerability is the scary thing,’ Thorpe says, ‘but it’s also how you get intimacy. It’s the price you pay at the door of getting to have this incredible relationship with someone.’ Ginder wants to abolish the calculated pauses that early dating supposedly requires: ‘If you are into someone, life is way too short; just get the ball rolling, send that message and use the momentum that’s there.’
Both writers are, in their own work, negotiating the same question from different angles. Ginder says he often ‘hides behind humour and cynicism’, and that showing the weirder, more idiosyncratic parts of his imagination has always felt like genuine exposure. Thorpe, by contrast, spent years avoiding the subject of romantic love altogether, having internalised the sense that, as a woman writing about women in love, she was somehow writing beneath herself. ‘I thought I was supposed to be like Hemingway or something,’ she says. It took years, she adds, to reach the conclusion that love ‘is very central to the experience of being a human’.
Ginder’s argument, developed in So, Old, So Young, extends this to friendship: pop culture, he suggests, places an impossible burden on romantic partnerships by asking one person to fulfil every emotional need, which quietly devalues the platonic relationships that are, ‘in their own way, sort of romances’. Thorpe responds with something close to a definition: ‘A good long friendship feels like the best novel you’ve ever read. I know who you were at 16. I know who you were at 26. I got the whole picture of your life, and it’s not blunted by what I need from you.’
Thorpe’s own bravest act, she tells Ginder, was telling her husband of six weeks that she was pregnant. They had no money, were both grad students, and had planned nothing. They married within 30 days and are still together 15 years later. ‘It came out like a hairball,’ she says, ‘but what was really alarming was that I couldn’t stop smiling as I said it.’ No Ordinary Love is available now; all five stories arrive on no-ordinary-love.com on 10 August.
