Guest post written by It Had To Be Him author Adib Khorram
Adib Khorram is the queer Iranian author of I’ll Have What He’s Having, which was an instant USA Today bestseller. He is also the author of the young adult novel Darius the Great Is Not Okay, which earned the William C. Morris Debut Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Young Adult Literature, and a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor, and was named one of Time magazine’s 100 Best YA Novels of All Time; his other young adult novels Darius the Great Deserves Better, Kiss & Tell, and The Breakup Lists as well as the picture books Seven Special Somethings: A Nowruz Story and Bijan Always Wins, have garnered critical acclaim, starred reviews, and bestsellers.
He grew up in Kansas City—the Milan of the Midwest—but he’d rather be in the real deal, sitting on a patio, enjoying an aperitivo. Find him online at adibkhorram.com.
About It Had To Be Him (out 2 September 2025): Heartstopper meets Eat Pray Love in this swoony, spicy, second-chance romance from USA Today bestselling author Adib Khorram about two former classmates unexpectedly reuniting in Italy.
I’ve got to confess something:
I LOVE romance novels without a third act breakup.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love angst, I love a good dark night of the soul, I love when the lovers part only to come crashing back together after a spectacular grand gesture. But there’s something so special to me about a story where the question isn’t whether they’ll be together, but how. Where the problems to be solved aren’t ones that must be confronted individually, separately, but as a team, working to build a new future.
One of my favorite examples of this (and one of the most perfect romances ever written, in my humble opinion) is Rebekah Weatherespoon’s Rafe: A Buff Male Nanny, which is exactly what the title implies. A story about Rafe, a buff male nanny, falling in love with Sloan, a single mother who’s an extremely successful doctor. Once Rafe and Sloan decide to be together, they stay together. They still have things to figure out: what Rafe’s future career will look like, what Sloan’s coparenting relationship with her shitty ex husband will be, but they solve those problems together.
Likewise, in Nisha Sharma’s Marriage & Masti, MA Wardell’s Mistletoe & Mishigas, and Rebecca Thorne’s Can’t Spell Tea Without Treason, the characters find their happy ever after together.
It’s not lost on me that these stories are also all by queer and BIPOC voices. (Granted, my own reading habits make that a statistical likelihood.) But I wonder how much these stories are a reflection of marginalized folks reaching for something in romance that we desire in life—a love that is effortless, that is easy, that is uncomplicated by the pressures of the real world seeking to tear us down or tear us apart. If I was an academic, maybe I could study the phenomenon, but alas, I’m just a guy who likes writing about people drinking wine and boning.
I’m proud to add It Had To Be Him to this list as well. when Ramin and Noah—old high school friends (and closet crushes) reunite in Italy twenty years after high school, their connection is immediate and intense, and though both have challenges to overcome, their lives have equipped them to do so—and to figure out what a future together looks like. Near the end of the novel, Noah believes he’s made a mistake and asks Ramin for another chance.
“You never lost your chance to begin with,” Ramin tells him, because he understands Noah and knows he couldn’t have acted any other way, not if he was going to keep being the man Ramin loves.
Isn’t that what we all deserve?
