If You Liked The Love Hypothesis, Here's What to Read Next
Bookdot Team • •
#the love hypothesis#ali hazelwood#STEM romance#readalikes#fake dating#grumpy sunshine
Olive Smith kisses a stranger in a hallway to convince her best friend she’s moved on, and the stranger turns out to be Adam Carlsen — the most feared, most brilliant professor in Stanford’s biology department, a man with a reputation for failing PhD students out of spite. What follows is a fake relationship that neither of them particularly wants and both of them, very obviously, need. Ali Hazelwood published The Love Hypothesis in 2021, and it became the book that proved STEM romance was not a niche — it was an appetite readers didn’t know they’d been starving.
The premise is engineered, almost literally, for maximum payoff: a heroine who processes the world through hypotheses and control groups colliding with a hero whose scowl is doing enormous amounts of emotional labor he refuses to acknowledge. It’s fake dating. It’s grumpy-sunshine. It’s enemies-to-something-else played out in labs and faculty meetings instead of ballrooms. And once you’ve read it, the hunt for the next book that scratches exactly that itch becomes its own research project.
Here’s the honest version of that search — mapped to the specific ingredients that made The Love Hypothesis addictive, not just books with a lab coat on the cover.
What You’re Actually Chasing
Before the list, it’s worth naming the mechanics Hazelwood is running, because they’re more specific than “STEM setting.”
The fake dating premise works because both characters have real, legible reasons to want the lie to hold, which means the fake intimacy keeps producing genuine intimacy as collateral damage. The competence kink is doing serious work — Olive is smart, Adam is smart, and the attraction is inseparable from watching two brilliant people take each other seriously. The grumpy-sunshine dynamic gives you a hero whose gruffness is a defense mechanism the heroine dismantles by refusing to be intimidated by it. The banter is fast, dry, and character-revealing rather than just funny. And underneath all of it is a heroine with a specific, articulated interior life — anxiety, ambition, a complicated relationship with her own competence — that the romance plot takes seriously rather than treating as texture.
The books below deliver one or more of these ingredients, and the ones that deliver the most will feel closest to home.
The Soulmate Equation by Christina Lauren — For the Actual Science
If you wanted more science, not just a scientist as decoration, this is the closest thing on the list. Jessica Davis, a single mother and freelance data analyst, gets talked into taking a DNA compatibility test from a buzzy new startup — and matches, at a genetic level nobody has ever scored this high, with River Peña, the company’s brilliant, difficult geneticist. The novel takes its algorithm premise seriously, working through what genetic compatibility science can and can’t actually predict about love, which gives the romance an intellectual spine that mirrors the way Hazelwood treats Olive and Adam’s research.
River is broody in the specific Adam Carlsen register — reserved, exacting, visibly unused to being emotionally outmaneuvered by anyone, let alone a woman who refuses to defer to his expertise. Watching Jessica hold her ground against his certainty is where the book earns its heat.
The Love Hypothesis connection: Real science as a plot engine, a data-driven heroine, a reserved genius hero slowly losing his composure.
The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang — For the Fake Relationship With Real Stakes
Helen Hoang’s 2018 debut follows Stella Lane, an econometrician on the autism spectrum who hires a male escort, Michael Larsen, to teach her about intimacy before she starts dating in earnest. What begins as a transactional arrangement — Stella approaching romance and physical intimacy the way she approaches everything, with research and structure — develops into something neither of them planned for.
Hoang, like Hazelwood, writes a heroine whose brain works differently from the romantic leads around her and refuses to apologize for it — Stella’s precision and her discomfort with ambiguity aren’t quirks to be cured, they’re simply how she is, and the book insists the right partner will meet her there rather than ask her to change. Michael’s warmth underneath his own guardedness gives the book its own version of the “the tough exterior is protecting something soft” architecture Hazelwood built with Adam.
The Love Hypothesis connection: A transactional arrangement that becomes real, a heroine whose analytical mind is the point rather than the obstacle, and a hero who’s gentler than his first impression suggests.
The Hating Game by Sally Thorne — For the Purest Enemies-to-Lovers Banter
Sally Thorne’s 2016 debut is the book most romance readers cite as the gold standard for enemies-to-lovers banter, and it’s easy to see why it pairs so well with Hazelwood’s work. Lucy Hutton and Joshua Templeman are executive assistants to co-CEOs at a publishing company formed by a merger of their two former employers, locked in a rivalry so committed it has its own rules and rituals — the staring contests, the escalating games, the office warfare that both of them clearly enjoy more than they’d admit.
What Hazelwood fans will recognize immediately is the dynamic underneath the antagonism: two competent people who respect each other’s competence long before either will admit to liking the other. The tension in The Hating Game isn’t manufactured through miscommunication — it’s generated by two people paying very close attention to each other and calling it hatred because the alternative is too vulnerable to name.
The Love Hypothesis connection: Workplace proximity, competence-driven attraction, banter that’s really a slow confession.
The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren — For the Fake Relationship Comedy
Olive Torres (no relation) and Ami Torres are twins; when Ami’s wedding turns into a food-poisoning disaster and every other guest gets sick, Olive and the best man, Ethan — her nemesis since the day they met — end up using the honeymoon package meant for the bride and groom, pretending to be a married couple in front of Ami’s new in-laws for ten days in Hawaii.
The comedy is broader than Hazelwood’s, but the shape of the plot is nearly identical to The Love Hypothesis: two people who actively dislike each other forced into a public performance of intimacy that keeps generating real feeling as a side effect. The gap between the lie and the truth is where both books do their best work, and Christina Lauren (the pen name of writing duo Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings) has a gift for making that gap very, very funny.
The Love Hypothesis connection: The fake relationship premise almost beat for beat, forced proximity, and a hero who turns out to be nothing like his first impression.
Well Met by Jen DeLuca — For Grumpy-Sunshine Outside the Lab
Jen DeLuca moves the grumpy-sunshine formula out of academia and into a small-town Renaissance faire, but the emotional architecture will feel instantly familiar to Hazelwood readers. Emily April agrees to help run her injured sister’s faire booth for the summer and finds herself constantly sparring with Simon Graham, the uptight high school teacher who runs the faire’s volunteer program and seems to disapprove of everything about her.
Simon is a grump in the Adam Carlsen tradition — rigid, rule-bound, quietly protecting people in ways he’d never describe as kindness — and Emily is the one character in his orbit who refuses to be managed by his gruffness. The setting is lighter and warmer than Stanford’s biology department, but the central pleasure is the same: watching someone chip, deliberately and patiently, at a wall that was never actually load-bearing.
The Love Hypothesis connection: The grumpy hero whose harshness is a defense mechanism, a heroine who refuses to be intimidated, small daily proximity that turns into something bigger.
The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun — For the Awkward, Brilliant Hero
Alison Cochrun’s 2021 debut swaps the lab for reality television, but it gives you the Hazelwood hero archetype in an even purer form: Charlie Winshaw is a socially anxious tech founder pushed onto a Bachelor-style dating show by his company’s board, and Dev Deshpande is the show’s producer assigned to make him presentable to America. Charlie is brilliant, blunt to the point of social catastrophe, and completely unequipped for the emotional performance the show demands of him — and Dev is the first person in years who seems interested in who Charlie actually is underneath the awkwardness.
Readers who loved that Adam Carlsen is brilliant and emotionally clumsy — not smooth, not practiced, genuinely bad at expressing what he feels until he isn’t — will recognize Charlie immediately. This is also the pick for anyone who wants Hazelwood’s competence-and-vulnerability combination in a queer romance.
The Love Hypothesis connection: A hero whose intelligence and social awkwardness come from the same place, forced proximity through professional obligation, and a slow unlearning of the instinct to hide.
Icebreaker by Hannah Grace — For the Competitive Tension
Hannah Grace’s 2022 hit trades the biology lab for a college hockey rink, but the competitive-tension engine underneath it runs on the same fuel as The Love Hypothesis. Anastasia Allen is a figure skater forced to share ice time with the university’s hockey team after a rink consolidation, and Nathan Hawkins is the team’s captain, instantly and mutually irritated by having to accommodate her.
The shared-space setup mirrors Olive and Adam being forced to share professional real estate they’d both rather not share, and Grace, like Hazelwood, is skilled at making proximity itself the source of tension — two disciplined, competitive people who can’t stop noticing each other precisely because they’re trying not to.
The Love Hypothesis connection: Forced shared space between two competitive high-achievers, mutual irritation curdling into mutual fixation, sports-and-STEM-adjacent competence as the attraction’s engine.
Love, Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood — For More of Exactly This
If you’ve somehow read The Love Hypothesis without working through the rest of Hazelwood’s catalog, start here. Love, Theoretically (2023) follows Elsie Hannaway, a theoretical physicist adjuncting at three different universities while moonlighting as a professional fake girlfriend, whose carefully compartmentalized life collapses when she meets Jack Smith — the experimental physicist brother of one of her fake-girlfriend clients, and a man she’s spent years publicly feuding with online over a scientific rivalry that isn’t entirely academic.
It’s Hazelwood doing her most confident work: the fake-relationship mechanics are doubled (Elsie’s actual job is performing relationships), the competence kink is turned up, and the banter has the specificity of a writer who has fully found her voice. Love on the Brain (2022) and the Loathe to Love You novella trio are the other essential stops if you want to stay in exactly this register.
The Love Hypothesis connection: It’s the same author working the same ingredients with a few more years of practice — which is, in its own way, the most direct answer to “what do I read next.”
Tracking Your Way Through the STEM Romance Shelf
STEM romance readers tend to move fast — Hazelwood’s backlist alone is six books deep, and every author on this list has a sizable catalog of their own. The genre also rewards a certain kind of completionism: once you know you respond to the fake-dating-plus-competence-kink combination, you want to track down every book that runs the formula well and skip the ones that don’t.
A reading tracker earns its keep here. Logging what you’ve read, rating which grumpy-sunshine pairings actually worked for you, and keeping a running TBR of readalikes means you’re never standing in a bookstore trying to remember whether you already read the Christina Lauren one. Bookdot lets you organize exactly this kind of reading — tracking series and standalones by author, tagging what you loved so patterns become visible, and building your next read list before the current book hangover even wears off.
The hunger The Love Hypothesis creates is specific: brilliant, difficult people being slowly disarmed by someone who refuses to be intimidated by their brilliance. The books above are the strongest answers currently in print. Read the ones that speak to the ingredient you missed most, and expect to end up, eventually, at all of them.
Building a TBR full of fake dating and grumpy-sunshine romance? Bookdot tracks every series, every author, and every book hangover so your next read is always one tap away.
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Frequently Asked Questions
- What books are similar to The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood?
- Books similar to The Love Hypothesis include The Soulmate Equation by Christina Lauren (a scientist heroine and a DNA-matching algorithm), The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang (a fake relationship between a data-driven heroine and a genuinely warm hero), and The Hating Game by Sally Thorne (enemies-to-lovers workplace banter with the same competitive tension).
- What should I read after finishing all of Ali Hazelwood's books?
- After finishing Hazelwood's STEM romance catalog — The Love Hypothesis, Love on the Brain, Love, Theoretically, and the Loathe to Love You novellas — readers tend to move to Christina Lauren's The Soulmate Equation and The Unhoneymooners, Helen Hoang's The Kiss Quotient, and Alison Cochrun's The Charm Offensive, all of which share her mix of banter, competence, and emotionally guarded characters.
- Are there other fake dating romance books like The Love Hypothesis?
- Yes — The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren and Well Met by Jen DeLuca both use a fake-relationship or forced-proximity premise to force two mismatched, bantering people together, in the same tradition as Olive and Adam's fabricated relationship in The Love Hypothesis.