There is a particular kind of cultural work that involves saying, clearly and in public, the thing most people privately think but have agreed not to mention. Raven Smith’s contribution to the Hinge No Ordinary Love audiobook does exactly that, and, in doing so, arrives at a piece of writing that is as much a small essay on performance and intimacy as it is a love story.
The audiobook, now in its third edition, collects five real love stories written and read by five different writers. Smith’s entry, Thou Shalt Play It Cool, follows Elena and Michael through the early stages of a relationship whose distinguishing feature was a refusal to follow the usual script. On their first date, the mushrooms were terrible. Michael said so. What followed, Smith suggests, was the collapse of the particular kind of theatre that attends meeting a stranger you hope to love: ‘There are entire ecosystems built around pretending you don’t care as much as you do.’ Elena and Michael ignored them entirely.
The series, which No Ordinary Love notes began in 2024, was developed in partnership with Dazed Studio, giving it an aesthetic alignment that is less lifestyle campaign than literary project. The third edition adds stories by Tembe Denton-Hurst, Nicola Dinan, Curtis Garner and Rufi Thorpe alongside Smith’s. It is available on Spotify, Substack and, as Inc. has noted, on Libby, a detail that quietly expands its reach beyond the obvious streaming audiences and into public library users, a rather different demographic from the one a dating app usually courts.
What Raven Smith No Ordinary Love finds in radical honesty
In a conversation released ahead of the campaign, Smith speaks with Amelia Abraham, author of Queer Intentions and Sex, Clubs, Dissent, about what the story taught him. The exchange is itself a minor performance of the thesis: two writers who trade in emotional candour talking about why candour is so difficult and why, when it arrives, it feels almost transgressive.
Smith frames the story’s central move as the dissolution of first-date ‘performance’. Being British, he observes, involves a particular brand of guardedness, so when Michael names the bad mushrooms, he is not just making a small complaint. He is opting out of an entire social contract. Abraham’s role in the conversation is to push that observation further, noting that the story’s honesty does not read as naivety but as choice: ‘The social conditions and context of our time do not particularly encourage us to feel certain,’ she says, ‘and that’s why certainty to me is the most romantic thing because it feels quite radical sometimes.’
Smith agrees. His own account of meeting his husband involves a year of deliberate casualness followed by a mutual and, by the sound of it, unambiguous recognition. What he extracts from Elena and Michael’s story is a confirmation of what he had already lived: that showing more of yourself is a larger risk, but also the only one that might actually work. The alternative, he suggests, is a kind of armour. If someone rejects the facade, it does not hurt, because nothing real was exposed. But it also means nothing real was offered.
The gendered weight of ‘too much’
The conversation turns, at Abraham’s prompting, to the term ‘too much’, a phrase Smith had already encountered through other work. He makes the observation, briskly and without labouring it, that the charge of being too much or oversharing lands differently depending on gender: ‘I don’t think men are seen as too much or are necessarily seen as over-sharers either. It feels like quite a gendered term, and there’s an expectation to minimise yourself in some way in order to be more palatable.’ Elena’s refusal to do this, in Smith’s reading, is not just a personality trait. It is something closer to a political act, or at least a refusal of a conditioning that usually goes unexamined.
Abraham adds a specifically queer register to this: a ‘doomer’ sensibility that, paradoxically, she finds generative. When the world feels sufficiently precarious, she observes among her circle of friends a ‘what have I got to lose?’ openness that might look like recklessness but functions more like clarity. The performance of cool recedes when the stakes feel genuinely high.
Smith’s final prescription is, characteristically, brief: therapy, and also the question of whether this particular person is worth setting your fears aside for. The third edition of No Ordinary Love is available now on Spotify, Substack and Libby.
