Love, Theoretically
Ali Hazelwood, 2023
A theoretical physicist pays her student loans by working as a professional fake girlfriend, then meets the one person who seems to see through every version of her. Witty and warm, with a sharp academic voice, a fake-dating setup, and a steady pull between longing and self-discovery.
Feels like longing and wonder. About identity, love and ambition.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy contemporary romance with brainy heroines, fake-dating tension, and workplace-adjacent comedy. The academic job-market anxiety and fake-girlfriend premise are constant, so the story may feel too career-focused if you want romance kept separate from professional stress.
Why read it
It offers a witty, identity-conscious romance about being seen accurately while ambition and money press in.
A page from the book
How a doctorate turns into a side hustle you never put on the CV.
Not that there would be anything wrong: sex work is legitimate work, and people who engage in it are just as deserving of respect as ballerinas, or firefighters, or hedge fund managers. But ten months ago, when I graduated with a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Northeastern, I figured that by now I’d have a reasonably remunerated academic position. I did not imagine that at twenty-seven I’d be paying my water bill by helping adult men pretend that they have dating lives. And yet here I am, fake-girlfriending my way through my student loans. Ali Hazelwood.Hazelwood is herself a professor of neuroscience, which is why her heroines' academic job-market misery reads like memory rather than research.
Books that feel like this
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The Love Hypothesis
Ali Hazelwood, 2021
To convince her best friend she is over a crush, a graduate student kisses a stranger in a lab hallway — who turns out to be the most feared professor in her department.
Bride
Ali Hazelwood, 2024
A Vampyre raised among Humans is summoned home and offered up as a bride to a Werewolf alpha. Fangs, snark, and a very reluctant alliance.
Love on the Brain
Ali Hazelwood, 2022
A neuroscientist lands her dream NASA project and finds her grad-school nemesis is co-leading it. Enemies, engineering, and a narrator with a stand-up's timing.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Love, Theoretically for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy contemporary romance with brainy heroines, fake-dating tension, and workplace-adjacent comedy. The academic job-market anxiety and fake-girlfriend premise are constant, so the story may feel too career-focused if you want romance kept separate from professional stress.
- What is Love, Theoretically like?
- Witty and warm, with a sharp academic voice, a fake-dating setup, and a steady pull between longing and self-discovery. Feels like longing and wonder. About identity, love and ambition.
- What should I read after Love, Theoretically?
- If you liked Love, Theoretically, try One Last Stop (Casey McQuiston), It Happened One Summer (Tessa Bailey) and Play Along (Liz Tomforde).
A taste of the feed
The nights you swear you'll never forget, and how quietly they go.
Nobody tells you how those nights that stand out in your memory—levee sunset nights, hurricane nights, first kiss nights, homesick sleepover nights, nights when you stood at your bedroom window and looked at the lilies one porch over and thought they would stand out, singular and crystallized, in your memory forever—they aren’t really anything. They’re everything, and they’re nothing. They make you who you are, and they happen at the same time a twenty-three-year-old a million miles away is warming up some leftovers, turning in early, switching off the lamp. They’re so easy to lose.
One Last Stop · Casey McQuiston
To be the one always understood, and never the one doing the understanding.
I never had to beg for your attention, and I’m not sure you’ll ever fully understand how safe that became for me, knowing you were giving it to me willingly. I never had to ask you to see me, to understand me, and I’m sorry that I haven’t allowed you to be able to say the same. But I promise you, Isaiah, now that my eyes have been opened, I can’t keep them off you.
Play Along · Liz Tomforde
The odd pride of finally taking care of yourself, and wondering if that's adulthood.
I like the idea of saving to buy a place of my own or having some extra in the bank for an adventure once I figure out what kind of adventure I want to have. I see all these choices unrolling in front of me - career, travel, friends, geography - and despite things being insane and hard and messy, I don’t think I’ve ever liked myself more than I do now. It’s the strangest feeling to be proud simply because I’m taking care of me and mine. Is this what it’s like to grow up?
The Unhoneymooners · Christina Lauren
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