Laura Steven - The Love Hypothesis

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.