Excerpt: Meet Me at the Met

Our Love Story in Emails

I had three clear goals at the start of 2015: learn how to box, learn how to swim, and fall in love. The last one was the only one I managed.

This is the beginning of the story of how.

On January 16, 2015 I posted the above tweet from Cairo, Egypt. Robert E. Rutledge, an astrophysicist from California, USA, who is a professor in Montreal, Canada responded.

We met in real life on Feburary 11, 2015, at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City: the Met of the title.

Between January 16 and February 11, we got to know each other via email. No phone calls. No FaceTime. Just email. We exchanged 1,000 emails in that time period. Today, to celebrate our online meet-cute, I am sharing with you an excerpt of how our love for each other developed through the written word.

These are the Tweets and emails we exchanged on January 16 and January 17, 2015.

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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her latest book is an anthology on menopause she edited called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.

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