The Love Hypothesis

At least the route home is pleasant. My neighborhood is a nice one; my dads are both tenured academics, so we live in the more affluent area of town. However, when you’re a chronic overthinker, walking four miles a day with just your own thoughts for company is a special kind of hell. And before you suggest podcasts or audiobooks, yes, I have tried them. Doesn’t work. My cogitation is louder than any headphones can plausibly go. I experience the audial equivalent of reaching the end of a page, then realizing you’ve absorbed precisely nothing because you’re so busy fixating on an embarrassing thing you said back in kindergarten.

Tonight is no exception. As I pass preppy spandex-clad joggers, Labradoodles in appalling Swarovski collars, and an implausible number of 4x4s, all I can do is replay the painful encounter with Haruki over and over again.

The public call-out. The subsequent loaded silence. The heat – oh god, the heat. Like my cheeks were being flame-grilled and served as the steak portion of a surf ‘n’ turf.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the ass-clenching moment when I stopped at the sound of his throat-clearing, and it became immediately, excruciatingly apparent that he was not clamoring for my attention.

And the look. The look he gave me – like I was nothing to him. Which I guess I am.

I take my time ambling home, in no rush to discuss what I learned at school today with my dads over dinner, like I do every night. Blame the heat, or the emotions, or the ABSURD QUANTITY OF THUNDERFLIES, but for whatever reason, my heels are dragging.

Argh. Why do I even care so much about Haruki’s lack of interest? I’m used to the whole unrequited-love deal. It’s not new to me. I should be better at handling it by now.

Because it’s definitely a pattern. A pattern with no outliers, no anomalies, no exceptions. Just data point after data point after data point of rejection. No, not even rejection. Rejection would require the objects of my affection to notice me enough to reject me in the first place.

Actually, there is one almost-exception. Kevin Cartwright. He’s a couple years older than me, and we had a string of hookups over the summer. It started with a drunken one-night stand at a house party – classy way to lose your V-plates, right? – and became a regular occurrence whenever he’d had so much as a sip of beer. But every time I texted him sober, he ghosted me. He only ever wanted to hook up when it was on his terms, and when his blood-alcohol level was past the legal limit.

One night – when he was super wasted – he told me he was still hung up on his ex, and that it wouldn’t be fair to me to turn whatever we had going into something more. And even though I was starting to kind of like the guy, I tried my best to bury whatever feelings I had for him. I knew deep down it wasn’t going anywhere.

Then he went away to college a few weeks back, at the same time as my older brother, and I haven’t heard a peep since. Guess I was just a way to kill time, when the lights were low and the beer goggles were firmly in place.

I sigh, inhaling warm summer air. The streets are quiet, even by my sleepy town’s standards. Nearby, an elderly man is cutting the grass with his shirt off. A grey-haired woman watches lovingly from the window. And, to be fair to the Matching Hypothesis, they are precisely the same level of hotness. Figures.

Pulling my phone out of my back pocket, I press the home button. My lock screen lights up: nada. No messages, no missed calls. Keiko will be rehearsing for tonight’s gig, and Gabriela will be tutoring after-school Spanish. She speaks, like, seven languages, has a makeup Insta with a gazillion followers, and bakes the best banana bread in the literal world.

Then she’ll be hanging out with her boyfriend, Ryan. They’ve been together since freshman year and are basically the same entity at this point. In fact, I’m not entirely sure she hasn’t absorbed his personality via osmosis. She had some actual points to make about the NFL draft the other day. Still, they’re pretty cute. He’s always picking up egg and cheese bagels for her breakfast, holding up her ring light so she can take the perfect selfies, making her study playlists on Spotify.

When I think of being with Haruki, that’s what I imagine. Not huge, grand gestures of rapturous romance. Not even necessarily the physical aspects of having a boyfriend. Just small, everyday kindnesses that let you know you’re loved.

For whatever dumb reason, I unlock my phone and open up the message chain between me and Kevin. It’s . . . confronting. The last three messages were all sent by me: a stack of shameless blue bubbles.

Hey, how are you? Are you going to Steph’s party this weekend? Hope to see you there. *beer emoji*

Kevin! Fancy a drink tomorrow night? My dads are out of town. And there’s red wine in the refrigerator. (I know. They’re criminals. Room temperature or bust.)

Hey! Just a quick message to say I hope your big move to Penn State goes well. Hit me up when you’re next home and we can catch up.

My skin crawls, reading them back. But they’re not that awful, are they? I obsessed so hard over striking the right balance between casual and flirty. Between upbeat and sarcastic. Between perfect and, well, perfect. And it still wasn’t enough to get his attention.

I can’t help but feel, like I do 201,674 times a day, that it’s all because of the way I look. The blank stares, the ghosted messages, the everlasting feeling of irrelevance. It has to be. Because I’m smart, I’m interesting, I’m funny (when I have the guts to actually crack jokes within earshot of other human beings). I’m a nice fucking person. And yet no guy has any interest. Why?

I’m about to shove my phone away when, as it always does, temptation strikes. What if this is the one time Kevin will reply? What if he’s drunk at a daytime frat party, and I send a message at the perfect moment, and he actually responds? It would soothe my self-hatred, if only for a moment. And hey, if he ignores me – what’s new? It can’t suck any more than it already does.

So I do it. I fire off a quick, breezy text, watch as the ‘delivered’ sign appears, and bury the phone back into my pocket. Maybe if I don’t look for a while, there will magically be a message waiting for me later tonight.

My pretty, faux-Edwardian house is detached and modestly sized. Vati – Dad #2 – is out front gardening, and as I’m walking up the driveway I almost don’t see him. He’s about two inches from the soil, hacking away manically at the border with a pair of secateurs. He’s a godawful gardener. Like, imagine you gave a donkey a pair of scissors and told it to go to town on your flowerbeds. That’s how our garden looks.

But Vati loves it, so Dad just lets him crack on and do his thing. That is love, right there. And not that I’ve ever, you know . . . rated the hotness of my fathers, or anything, but they are pretty similar levels of good-looking and socially desirable. The Matching Hypothesis never fails.

‘Bärchen !’ he calls, dropping his tools and kneeling back on his haunches. Vati – Dr Felix Kerber – is Austrian. He’s always called me Bärchen, ever since I was teeny. Little bear. It still warms my heart.

‘Hey, Vati,’ I say, stopping just short of the front door. ‘How goes the gardening? Zu heiß, nein ?’ That’s about as far as my German goes. Gabriela is the language goddess of our friendship tripod, and is completely fluent. Vati always loves when she visits.

‘Ja, this heat is ridiculous,’ Vati replies. ‘And I’m making a real mess of this. I never did know what to do with bushes.’

And then he guffaws. Actually guffaws. At his own disgusting joke.

I mime gagging, and shout back, ‘Is Dad inside? I would like some sensible conversation, for once in my life.’

Vati is too busy guffawing to respond.

Our dog Sirius – a one-eyed cockapoo – greets me at the door with a half-hearted tail wag. He is very old and very lazy, and his depth perception is very bad on account of the one-eye situation. Also, his face smells like a rotting corpse. Apart from that, I love him very much. Unfortunately, Sirius loves nothing but barbecue ribs.

I find Dad washing potatoes in the kitchen sink. Dumping my backpack on the counter, I immediately raid the fridge, as I do every night. And, as he does every night, Dad says in his dulcet Bostonian tones, ‘You will ruin your dinner.’

He’s the sensible one, Dad. While goofy Vati plays the clown, cracking inappropriate jokes and generally throwing caution to the wind, Dad is more subdued. As a world-leading expert in experimental hepatology, Dr Michael Murphy is not interested in your scatological humour. He is painfully smart, painfully literal, and affectionate in his own special way.

‘Dad, there’s every chance that the Higgs Boson being made over at the Large Hadron Collider are becoming unstable at this very second,’ I say dramatically, while peeling a string cheese into my palm. ‘By the time I’ve finished this sentence, one could have triggered a catastrophic vacuum decay, causing space and time, as we know it, to collapse.’ Triumphantly, I cram several pieces of stringy deliciousness into my mouth. ‘In which case, dinner will be ruined regardless.’

‘Very good,’ Dad grumbles. ‘But since you have finished your sentence – and your snack – without a black hole in sight, you can close that fridge door, grab a vegetable peeler, and tell me about your day.’

3

Thanks to a potent dinner-table combination of intelligent conversation and creamy mashed potatoes, I manage to avoid checking my phone for a good couple of hours.

As I traipse upstairs, belly full of schnitzel, I’m almost dizzy with the anticipation of pulling my phone out and seeing Kevin’s name light up my screen. Or Haruki’s. Or anyone’s, for that matter.

It’s been two hours. I’ll probably have several messages in my group chat with Keiko and Gabriela, comprising pre-show selfies like we always get from Keiko, and witty comments from Gabriela about the spoilt rich kids she tutors. Possibly even a missed FaceTime call, if Gabriela’s particularly mad. Perhaps Leo, my brother, has tagged me in a nerdy meme only he and I would find funny. Maybe Haruki has reached out via Instagram to apologize for dropping me in the shit this afternoon. And surely Kevin will have replied by now, right? It’s been two hours. Two hours!

For no real reason, I make a slight ceremony of the phone-checking. I get into comfy sweats and an oversized T-shirt, throw my hair up into a messy pony, switch on a couple lamps and my fairy lights, and curl up cross-legged on my bed. Dad must’ve put fresh bedding on this afternoon, because the plain white duvet cover with tiny pink flowers smells of lavender and camomile. That’s when you can tell Dad is getting bored on sabbatical. He does all the laundry imaginable, instead of finishing the book proposal he’s supposed to be working on.

When I’m finally ready, I press the home button on my phone.

Nothing.

Just the time – 9:01pm – and my background photo. Keiko and Gabriela’s shiny faces smile back at me. We took that picture after Keiko’s first ever gig, when we were all sweaty and high on adrenaline and good music. I’m sandwiched between the two of them, and you can barely see my face through Keiko’s blue hair.

No texts. No calls. No notifications. Nada.

I shouldn’t care. I know I have people around me who love me. Keiko and Gabriela, and my dads, even my big brother, although he’s usually far too busy studying to pay me any attention. I know they care. It’s just . . .

Technology today makes it so easy to constantly communicate with your loved ones. So when they don’t communicate, when they all ignore you at once, it’s the worst feeling. They could get in touch with you. They just don’t.

I forever feel like everyone else gets more messages, more calls, more notifications than me. Everyone around me is forever looking down at their screen, laughing at something funny in their family group chat, swooning over a selfie from their crush, sighing as they faux-complain about how many notifications they have to read. And I just sit there, pretending to be doing the same, when really the only people who would ever message me are in the very same room.

It’s pathetic, and I hate myself for caring. But I do. I just want a guy to text me and let me know he’s thinking about me, to ask me how my day was, to send funny pictures to cheer me up when I’m down. It seems like everyone has that but me.

So, I do what I do almost every night when I’m down about my love life, or lack thereof. I whizz through my homework, take a long, hot shower, wait ’til my dads are both asleep – they usually hit the hay early – then sneak down to the refrigerator to retrieve half a glass of red wine. A full glass and they’d notice, but half usually slips under the radar, providing I remember to wash the glass and put it away again after I’ve finished.

Then I tiptoe back upstairs, lock my bedroom door, and engage in my dirty little secret: trashy rom-coms from the early noughties. Movies from before social media, before selfies, before the constant need for validation, before memes and Facebook politics. Just shamelessly cheesy romance and all the happy endings a girl could want.

My dads would murder me if they found me watching this crap. It’ll rot your brain cells, they’d say. Try this NASA documentary instead. Or if you have to watch a movie, at least start with Guillermo del Toro.

But hey. You can’t help what you love. And what I love is curling up in my empty bed with half a glass of red wine and watching cheesy rom-coms with the volume turned down low.

Ugly nerd on the outside, lonely middle-aged spinster on the inside. Form an orderly queue, fellas.

Tonight’s pick is Just Friends, because I have a massive soft spot for Ryan Reynolds, like almost everyone with retinas. It’s basically an in-depth study of the Matching Hypothesis. Ryan Reynolds’ character doesn’t get the classically hot girl until he changes everything about his physical appearance to match her level of attractiveness. Standard.

I’ve seen the film a couple times before, so I scroll aimlessly through my phone as I watch. Because I’m clearly a fan of torturing myself, I open up the conversation with Kevin – if you can even call a one-sided deluge of messages a conversation – and stare at my unanswered text.

Hey! You settling in okay? Hope you’ve managed to find a gaming buddy to replace Bryan.

And so begins the cringing.

Why did I have to go and make it so personal? I mean, he only told me about how much he was going to miss his gaming buddy because he was drunk. I’m pretty sure he did not want to be reminded of that. And here I go, dropping it into conversation like some kind of needy stalker. Does he think I’m a psycho for even remembering that? I bet he barely remembers what colour my eyes are, let alone the names of my best friends.

Hastily, just so I don’t have to look at it any more, I delete the message, wishing this very act would remove it from his phone too.

I sigh, shove my phone under my duvet and lean back against the stack of pillows I’ve propped against my headboard. The TV and my fairy lights flicker in the darkness. The window is cranked all the way open, and the street outside is moonlit and peaceful, save for a few crickets chirping in the trees. The smell of warm sidewalks and cut grass drifts into my bedroom on the breeze. I take a sip of heady red wine, enjoying the rich, fruity flavour and faint buzz of alcohol. I feel young and old all at once.

Speaking of old, this time next year I’ll be at college, if all goes according to plan. My first choice is MIT. Both my dads are alumni – that’s where they first met – and Leo is there now, studying Chemical Engineering. It’s a Kerber-Murphy family thing. And in twelve short months, I could be there too, studying Astrophysics at one of the best institutes in the world. I spent the whole of the tour visit I took this summer with goosebumps running up and down my arms.

That reminds me. Mrs Torres told me earlier in the week that she’d read over my personal essay and provide notes. I honestly don’t know what I’d do without that woman. She’s writing my letter of recommendation, too, and I have every faith she’s going to knock it out the park.

I pull my phone out from its nook in the bedsheets and refresh my email to see if she’s gotten back to me yet. Nope, nothing. Not even a single email. Seriously, am I some kind of leper? I text my group chat with Keiko and Gabriela just to make sure. It doesn’t even deliver to Keiko, and even though Gabriela reads, she doesn’t reply. She always does this – she’s usually too busy hanging out with Ryan to answer.

Muscle memory leads me to perform my cursory evening perusal of Haruki’s social-media accounts. He’s the kind of guy who’s way too cool for Instagram. He’s popular without even trying. So as usual, he’s uploaded precisely nothing today. His last post was a shot of Lake Michigan from the penthouse of his family’s flagship hotel, where he spent most of his summer working as a kayak instructor. A few posts earlier is a picture of him helping a tiny kindergartner to buckle his life jacket.

Something twinges in my chest. I wish I was the kind of person Haruki Ito could fall for. I wish he would look at me the same way I look at him.

I shift in my duvet burrito, suddenly restless and antsy. I want to do something about this. About this perennial feeling of being unwanted. Undesirable.

Maybe science has the answer. Science can answer almost all of the important questions in the universe. So why not this? We’ve been studying love and attraction for centuries. We know that lust is governed by both estrogen and testosterone, and that attraction is driven by adrenaline, dopamine, and serotonin. Long-term attachment is governed by a different set of hormones and brain chemicals: oxytocin and vasopressin, which encourage bonding. Each of these chemicals works in a specific part of the brain to influence lust, attraction and attachment.

Surely, throughout hundreds of years of studying these things, someone has found a way to manipulate them? I mean, come on. Imagine possessing a wealth of knowledge in this field. That dark part of your mind would totally be tempted to manipulate that information to your advantage, no? To find a drug or hack to get other people to fall in love with you. Hedonistic renaissance dudes weren’t exactly known for their moral compasses.

I pull up a new browser window on my phone and start researching whether anyone has ever attempted to manufacture these hormones and brain chemicals. However, all I find on Google are dating sites filled with hokey pseudo-science, and so-called ‘love doctors’ promising to transform the lives of even the most hideous homo sapiens. A cursory glance at some more academic sources pulls up social anthropology journals and neuropsychology papers which explore the theories behind love and attraction, but there’s nothing to suggest they’ve attempted to put these findings into practice.

I’m about to give up and focus on Anna Faris singing ‘Forgivenesssss’ on my TV screen when an abstract catches my eye.

Scientists have discovered the key to attraction lies in a new type of pheromone which has recently been identified in the Brazilian Honey Beetle. The researchers behind the study, all three of whom are doctoral candidates at the University of São Paulo, believe that extracting this chemical and distilling it into pill form . . .

The rest of the abstract is hidden behind a paywall. I run a search on the paper’s author – Professor Pablo Sousa – and the university website comes up with several hits, all relating to his research on the Brazilian Honey Beetle. He’s won several prizes for his work, and is now celebrating ANVISA approval of a drug prototype based on his findings. From what I can gather, ANVISA is the Brazilian equivalent of the FDA.

I’m desperate to read the entirety of the paper, and notice a small login portal beside the paywall, which grants access to those with an existing university ID. A dropdown menu shows they accept IDs from most major institutions, and I notice Vati’s college on the list.

Inspiration strikes. Vati’s desktop computer sits downstairs in sleep mode, with no password protection whatsoever. If his email account is open, I could simply request a password reminder, open and delete the email before he sees it, and use the deets to access this paper. I’m a genius.

As I pass their bedroom, Dad’s earthquake snores rumble through the closed door. I stifle a laugh. He’s such a quiet, restrained man, and yet his sleep apnea turns him into some kind of meteorological emergency. Between enormous snores, I can hear Vati muttering, ‘Verdammt noch mal, Michael!’, which loosely translates as ‘For fuck’s sake.’ He says something else along the lines of removing his throat with a machete, but like I say, my German is not great.

Leapfrogging over Sirius as he lies snoozing at the bottom of the stairs, I make it to the computer in the dining room and load it up. While I’m waiting for it to whir into life, I look at the photos taped to the bottom of the monitor with literal duct tape, because Pinterest-worthy our house is not. There’s the four of us at the Rube Goldberg machine at the Museum of Science Boston; the four of us watching rat basketball at Discovery Place; the four of us playing mini golf at the Science Museum of Minnesota. In every single picture, Leo and I are concentrating intently, and Vati is pranking Dad – pulling pants down, drawing rat whiskers on him in Sharpie, using golf clubs to perform wedgies, etc.

As I open up Vati’s email account, I can’t help but grin. My dads are like my best friends, and my childhood has been so great. It’s a bittersweet feeling, knowing it’ll be over soon. There’s something hollow beneath the bittersweetness, too, but I can’t quite place it.

‘Bärchen ?’

Swiveling around, I see Vati standing in the doorway, fuzzy chest hair poking through the top of his bathrobe.

I leap back from the computer, as though I’ve been caught performing some kind of diamond heist. ‘Vati. I was just, erm . . .’

‘Hacking my emails.’ He says this in a jokey way, i.e. the way he says everything ever.

‘I thought you were asleep,’ I say, as though this is a valid legal defense.

‘Nein, nein. Dad eins, he sleeps like a woodchuck. Me? Well, what is the opposite of a woodchuck?’

I have no idea what a woodchuck is, nor how one might sleep, so I decide not to push the matter.

‘What are you really doing, Bärchen ?’ he asks gently, perching on the edge of the oak dining table. He looks very tired, but also jolly, which shouldn’t be possible.

I decide the truth isn’t exactly incriminating, so I say, ‘I need your institution login to access a research paper.’

‘Ah, wunderbar !’ he exclaims. ‘Which paper?’

Chewing my bottom lip, I admit, ‘It’s about the laws of attraction.’

Vati’s features soften. ‘You like someone, ja ? And you want to seduce them?’

‘Please never say “seduce” again.’

‘Bärchen, you don’t need any papers to make a boy like you. You are the best person in the world, so. You can take poison on that.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Ah, maybe that is a German idiom.’ Vati frowns and strokes his stubbled jaw. ‘I think you say, “You can bet your life on that”?’

I chuckle. ‘That makes more sense.’

He stands up and ruffles my hair, which is brave, considering it hasn’t been washed in days. ‘My password is Bärchen, followed by your birthday. Lower case, no umlaut. Because the university is racist, of course.’

‘Of course.’ I grin and hug him round the waist. ‘Thanks, Vati.’