Introduction: On Ending Up Happy
I love a good meet-cute story. You know the kind: On first meeting, two would-be lovers dislike each other, but they eventually fall in love. Someone is usually a jerk in the beginning. Someone misunderstands something. Circumstances conspire to make things worse. The should-be lovers, against their wishes, are thrown together and must muddle through somehow. During all that muddling, the improbable couple falls in love. It’s a convention full of hope—tough beginnings make happy endings.
Maybe that’s why the meet-cute is so right for stories of LGBTQ folks: We usually find ourselves in tough beginnings. Then circumstances conspire to make things really hard on us. Falling in love happens against all odds.
But darn it if we don’t deserve our happy endings too.
My wife and I had our own meet-cute story. I was a young professor, and she was a new therapist at the university’s counseling center. She wanted to start an LGBTQ student group, and several folks told her to contact me to do it, since I’d already started a women’s center on campus and was a generally gung-ho kind of professor. But our first meeting went off the tracks—she showed up on the wrong day, and I wasn’t even on campus. Then, thinking she’d showed up on the right day but had been stood up by me, she stood me up on the day I was there. As a result, when we finally met, we were both cranky and a little rude to each other.
Luckily for both of us, we realized the mishap, and she invited me over to watch a movie and help fix up a couple of her friends. During all the matchmaking machinations, my future-wife and I clicked, and we’ve been together ever since—eighteen years and counting. (I’m not sure if Kyle and Stephen are still together, but I hope they are.)
I’m sure my wife would tell this story differently—I’m sure in her version, the mistakes were mine, not hers, and I was probably somehow a jerk. But I have the pen right now, so I get to be the decider of everything. That’s the power of telling a story: How it happens and what it means is up to you.
It’s not far off from how it feels to write your own love story, if you choose to do it. LGBTQ people cannot always rely on the old love story scripts because our plotlines are often very different from the most common traditional ones, with unique pleasures and dangers. Most of the old love stories don’t apply to us, unless we bend them to fit. For instance, when legal marriage was not a possibility, we made our own traditions of faithfulness. When our families and communities rejected us, we made our own families out of those who did accept and care for us. LGBTQ folks have always had to keep a grain of salt in our pockets.
Until recently, we haven’t had the opportunity to tell—or read—stories about ourselves at all. Having few models in literature, movies, or even in our own lives to show how it can be is tough, but it also gives us great opportunity to write our own stories. We’re not limited by readymade models. We had to get creative. Nobody has to be a helpless princess or a tirelessly dashing prince. Nobody really needs those models, but because the models often don’t fit us at all, it’s easier to see we don’t need them. We don’t even need a “happily ever after,” as long as we’re happy.
Each of the stories in this collection, in its own way, is a “meet-cute” story. First, there’s the classic versions, in which two people meet under impossible circumstances but wind up falling in love. In “I Ate the Whole World to Find You” by Tom Wilinsky and Jen Sternick, a budding chef meets a crotchety Olympic swimming hopeful and wins him over by cooking delicious, specially crafted meals. In Jude Sierra’s “August Sands,” two boys on the verge of adulthood (college, independent lives) meet and fall in love while on one last vacation with their families. Falling in love, however, is only the beginning—they have to decide whether to cling to each other or dive alone into the unwritten future. In both of these classic “meet-cute” stories, big life changes loom on the horizon. Deciding to let yourself fall in love in the shadow of those big changes is daunting, a bit dangerous, brave.
“Love in the Time of Coffee” by Kate Fierro takes the basic idea of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera (friends separated by another love interest, then reunited in newfound passion) and turns it on its toes. Now two best friends, Gemma and Anya, learn to see past boy-craziness and convention to meet each other anew as lovers.
Finally, Julia Ember’s “Gilded Scales” roams furthest from the classic “meet-cute” story—it’s more of a classic “girl-meets-dragon” tale. You know the old formula: a would-be warrior is barred from combat because she is a girl; through a series of mishaps, she meets a dragon and romance ensues. Okay, it’s not exactly an old formula, and you probably don’t know it, but I don’t want to give away too much of the story. It is the tale of a very unlikely couple, and of how real love can rescue you from the palest prison of a life, even if it doesn’t look like everybody else’s idea of love.
The thing that holds all “meet-cute” stories together is hope. Love, in all its forms, is always an act of hope. It means you’re willing to leap unprotected into the future, to risk safety and familiarity to be with another person. This can be especially true for LGBTQ people, who often have much farther to leap.
Things may look dire, but we are powerful people. Things may be darkest before dawn, but we don’t need to wait for the sun to rise; we can turn on a light. We can rewrite the old stories. Tough beginnings make happy endings. We can make our own happiness and we don’t have to slay a dragon to do it.
About the Editor: Alysia Constantine is a critically acclaimed author whose novels blur the line between reality and fantasy, feature luscious prose and explore complex themes of otherness. Her novels Sweet (Interlude Press, 2016) and Olympia Knife (Interlude Press, 2017) received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Foreword Reviews, respectively. She lives in the Lower Hudson Valley with her wife, two dogs, and a cat and is a former professor at a New York arts college.