The Love Hypothesis

49 pages1-hour read

Fiction

Novel

Adult

Published in 2021

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Themes

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness, emotional abuse, racism, and sexual harassment.

The Value of Emotional Intelligence

In The Love Hypothesis, Hazelwood highlights the importance of valuing types of intelligence beyond the academic kind. Olive, Adam, and others within the Stanford community possess scientific intelligence. However, the characters’ experiences reveal that intrapersonal, interpersonal, and emotional intelligence, while not the traditional focus of academia, are also important strengths.

Although Olive possesses academic intelligence, she struggles with emotional intelligence. She is always seeking new information with which to supplement what she already believes. Tom’s jealousy and view of Olive as a threat shows just how intelligent her thought processes are. Emotional intelligence is the ability to manage one’s own emotions, as well as understand the emotions of others. As shown through her frequent babbling and lengthy paragraphs of rambling thoughts, Olive doesn’t have a strong understanding of her emotions. She gets caught up in thinking about her research and studies that she lets other types of intelligence fall by the wayside. In Chapter 10, Anh observes that Olive and Adam are head-over-heels in love and have been for a while. Olive realizes Anh’s right about her own feelings and spirals into a panic because this truth “had been there, staring at Olive for the past few days, and she hadn’t noticed” (171). Faced with emotions Olive doesn’t understand, she chooses to distance herself from them and lie to cover them up, rather than approach and seek to understand them.

Unlike Olive, Malcolm is very in touch with his emotions. He understands Olive’s feelings for Adam far easier than Olive does and offers solutions, many of which Olive rejects because they are too much for her to consider. Malcolm easily falls into a relationship with Holden because he is comfortable with himself and can easily parse Holden’s emotions. Where it takes the entire book for Olive to truly come to terms with how she feels about Adam, Malcolm and Holden find one another in a few chapters, illustrating how interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence support healthy relationships.

Academic culture, Olive’s struggles with her emotions, and Malcolm’s relationship with Holden show how different people excel at different types of intelligence. Although the novel focuses on elite scientists, Hazelwood ultimately argues that emotional intelligence is just as important as academic intelligence.

Balancing Work with Personal Life

Throughout the novel, Olive makes references to how much time and energy graduate school takes. She has little personal time to herself and regularly works long hours without adequate sleep or food. Compounding these problems, she’s paid little for her efforts. Through Olive’s research and relationship with Adam, The Love Hypothesis argues that people are more than their job.

Hazelwood uses Olive’s classmates to illustrate the struggles of finding work-life balance. When Greg is upset, Olive jokingly thinks it’s likely one of the normal reasons grad students are upset, such as having their “self-worth […] unbreakably tied to [their] academic performance” (113). While this is framed as a joke, it’s not far from the truth. Greg is upset because Adam’s feedback on his thesis will set him back, forcing him to redo months of work and dedicate even more of his time to school. Below this frustration, though, is the fear of not graduating on time and being unable to find a post-doc position in the same place as his wife. Greg has a life outside of academia. Just because the challenges of grad school can push those other concerns to the side doesn’t mean they aren’t just as real and valid as the degree.

Likewise, Olive’s research overtakes much of her life. She spends sleepless nights working in the lab and substitutes bags of chips for real meals, all in the name of her research. She prioritizes graduating on time so she can find a post-doc program and go through the same hardships again, if at a slightly higher pay grade. She doesn’t want to attend the biology department picnic, partly because Adam will be there but also partly because it will take her away from her work. Despite her concerns, she ends up having a good time, showing she does appreciate having a life away from work and that she’s more than her degree program.

Olive and Adam’s relationship allows them both to escape their labs for a few minutes every week and eventually leads to them finding who they are away from science. Olive has dedicated so much of herself to her research because of her mother that it’s difficult for her to pull herself away. As a world-renowned researcher, Adam has pressures that require his full attention. Both situations make it easy for work to bombard their lives. Through falling in love, they learn who they are and who the other person is away from the lab.

Family, relationship, and general living concerns force Olive, Adam, and others to step away from their labs and work. Hazelwood uses Olive and Adam’s love story to remind readers of the importance of making time for themselves and their relationships despite the pressure of contemporary society’s obsession with work.

Systemic Inequality in Academia

Hazelwood uses the high-pressure environment of STEM academia to examine how some authority figures stand in the way of progress to protect their own privilege. Olive, Adam, and Anh each experience systemic struggles both through academia and society. Their trials stem from those who are either jealous of their work or fearful of what would happen if they were allowed to be equal.

Olive faced struggles being accepted to graduate school. As a young woman from Canada, she had neither the money nor connections to be afforded an easy admission into Stanford’s program. Her confrontations with Tom show how privilege begets an overdeveloped sense of power. Tom is jealous of Olive’s work and fears what would happen if she was allowed to publish, possibly unseating his cushy position at Harvard. Jealousy and fear render him desperate, and he uses his status to exploit Olive by sexually harassing her and threatening to steal her work. He’s confident that his privilege as a celebrated researcher and a white man gives him the security to ensure she won’t be believed even if she speaks out against him. Due to the nature of her research, Tom’s interference is a threat to the lives of countless cancer patients as well as Olive’s future.

During his graduate school years, Adam experienced similar abuse from his advisor. His advisor was a well-known name in the subject who was likely afraid of losing his status to someone young and talented like Adam. Tom had a hand in Adam’s hardship, but that doesn’t change how poorly Adam’s advisor treated his students. It also highlights the cutthroat behaviors encouraged in male-dominated fields with little accountability and a high threshold for targeting the weakest links.

Anh faces discrimination in the department as well as a Vietnamese woman. While the result of that discrimination is not shown having an impact on Anh, it is implied through her dogged pursuit for equality in STEM. She faced barriers applying and being accepted to graduate school, likely from people who were jealous of her intelligence and talent or fearful of the change she might bring to academia and the privilege within it. Anh leads a group for BIPOC women and makes great strides toward equality over the course of the book, demonstrating the importance of perseverance in the fight for change. Through Olive, Adam, and Anh’s struggles in their respective fields, Hazelwood exposes how the abuse of privilege threatens to hinder progress in science as well as society at large.