One & Only is a work of contemporary romantic fiction, a genre centering on love and relationships that commonly relies on tropes like opposites-attract, age-gap, best-friend’s brother, forbidden love, second-chance, and forced proximity to fuel plotlines and to create tension between the love interests. Such tropes offer readers a familial narrative scaffolding to navigate unexpected love stories. Within this genre, One & Only is particularly in conversation with works including Rebecca Serle’s Once and Again, which combines a broadly realistic look at marriage and missed opportunities with a protagonist who can turn back time, Suzanne Park’s One Last Word, which centers on a Korean American woman working in the tech industry, and Tia Williams’s A Love Song for Ricki Wilde, which follows an era-spanning love story from the Harlem Renaissance to 21st-century New York.

The novel can also be classified under the romantic comedy subgenre. Traditional romantic comedies follow a primary love story between two characters who meet by chance—in a scene called the meet-cute—and who struggle either to acknowledge their feelings for each other or to overcome the odds working against their potential relationship.