The True Love Experiment

“There’s a roadblock on the way to ‘I love you’ now, a NO ACCESS sign in my brain.”

This metaphor captures the writer’s block that Fizzy is feeling during her dating drought and lack of attraction, which she fears has impaired her ability to complete a romance novel. This points to The Power of Physical Attraction, one of the novel’s themes, and furnishes the internal conflict driving her character arc; she needs to experience romance to write convincingly about it.

“I could have lived this life with the two of them. It would have been platonic and passionless, yes, but stable and loving. I’d assumed there had to be something more out there, but really, it’s not like my love life is any more electric than it was when we were married.”

As a parallel to the previous chapter, which established Fizzy’s lack of love, this excerpt from Connor’s chapter reveals that he has a similar yearning for romance, even if he isn’t prioritizing that search. This similarity establishes that both protagonists are ready to discover and be affected by one another, setting them up as the romantic leads.

“He is hot in a very obvious way. If I were writing this book, I’d immediately cast him as Hot Millionaire Executive.”

Fizzy’s casting of Connor when she meets him for the first time is a playful use of the hero archetypes of romance, which becomes an overt plot device when casting dating candidates for the show. Finding him “hot” establishes that Connor will help Fizzy reclaim her feelings of attraction and desire. That Connor is hard for her to peg down also signifies that theirs is a “real” romance and not scripted or predictable, marking him as the novel’s true hero from an early moment.

“I feel like I’m stepping into a dark, foggy alley with nothing but a rolled-up newspaper to defend me against surprise knife attacks.”

Connor creates a metaphor to describe his vulnerability when he realizes Fizzy is taking charge of the dating show. The metaphor subverts typical gendered expectations; she is powerful, symbolized by the knife, while his weakness and lack of control are embodied by the rolled-up newspaper.

“I can’t even locate the Hot Millionaire Executive archetype in Connor anymore. He is all soft and brawny. Soft Lumberjack is his new name.”

Fizzy’s changing labels for Connor as different archetypes provide a funny motif that creates a humorous tone in the novel. Her changing assessment also hints that she is seeing below the surface and discovering new dimensions to him. Here, “Soft Lumberjack” simultaneously conveys rugged masculinity and sensitivity. His many facets fascinate her and ultimately lead from attraction to love.

“I run into this question like it’s a brick wall. I’ve known that finding me a match is the entire goal of the show, but I haven’t internalized it at all. If Connor and I are successful, it will be more than just entertainment for my target audience. I could end up with a lover, a boyfriend, a soulmate.”

Echoing the earlier metaphor of the roadblock, Fizzy compares her resistance to finding love to a brick wall. This is a standard beat in romance plots, connecting the novel to the genre. The phrasing foreshadows that Connor could be her soulmate.

“Connor shrugs, taking another sip of his beer, and affection clutches at me as I register yet again how easy he is to be around and how much I genuinely like him.”

This passage captures the dramatic moment in which Fizzy realizes she isn’t only attracted to Connor, but she likes him as a person. This is an important element in the romance equation, and the ease of being around him signals their compatibility as partners.

“I am but a mortal woman after all, and once again I want Connor Prince III to crush me beneath him like a delicate flower under a fallen tree.”

Just after she has the feeling of falling for Connor, Fizzy uses this metaphor to express her increased attraction to him—her desire is symbolized by her as a flower “crushed” by him, representing a desire to be totally overtaken by passion. This passage also represents how she is still, at this point, avoiding her real feelings and pretending it’s just sexual attraction. This reflects a standard romance arc in which characters grow into feeling affection, then love.

“Connor is an oak tree, and the more time I spend with him the more I register how frequently I feel like a stray leaf blown at the whim of my impulsive decisions and my roller-coaster job and even my own moods.”

One of the successful elements of the romance formula is the way the characters complement one another, each providing something the other protagonist needs. For Fizzy, it is Connor’s steadiness. The matching images of the tree and the leaf suggest their compatibility, even if their personalities are quite different.

“She walks in and my heart drops down my body and through the floorboards.”

This passage provides an amusing image that describes Connor’s feelings when he sees Fizzy the night after they embraced at the beach. The character realizes he is in danger of falling in love—symbolized by the falling language here—but he is still resisting, a romance trope. This also captures his attraction to her, a driving element of the story.

“Even after only the first round of dates I’m already considering I might not fall for one of these objectively fantastic Heroes because I can’t stop looking over their heads at the executive producer in the background.”

Whereas earlier in the book Fizzy questioned whether she was open to love, her emotional journey is changing around the midpoint. Now, she wonders if she isn’t open to finding love on the show because she’s too interested in Connor. This development adds tension and raises the stakes since both Fizzy and Connor want the show to be a success. The text here takes on a breathless quality because it purposefully drops the comma after the introductory clause, mimicking Fizzy’s feelings.

“This is purely sexual. It’s not like he and I are going to fall in love. I am a loud, romance-writing, adventure-seeking, opinionated woman. And he is a tall, sporty white man named Connor Prince III. I think we can all agree it’s just a matter of time before I do something too shocking, or he’ll do something to annoy and/or bore me.”

This passage establishes Fizzy’s character obstacle—she wants to consider a relationship with Connor in purely sexual terms, which is ironic because she is already falling in love. Her typecasting of both herself and Connor demonstrates her continued resistance.

“I wanted her to be mine, still. She’d been right, what she said at the beach; I hadn’t realized how hard it would be to share her once the show began.”

A key beat in romance novels is the moment when characters realize what they feel, and this passage captures a new movement in Connor’s feelings for Fizzy. Seeing her flirt with and date other men has made him feel competitive and jealous. He realizes he had sex with her in part because of his possessiveness, in part because of his intense attraction, and in part because he’s aware he is falling in love with her.

“Sex is sex, it doesn’t have to mean everything! But, it also doesn’t have to mean nothing.”

Part of Fizzy’s character arc is realizing that she’s been avoiding her feelings by insisting she is only interested in casual sex. While that was fine with other men, sex with Connor is different and meaningful, which indicates that he is important to her. The sex also involves emotional bonding and helps the love between them develop. She teases out two opposing thoughts here, realizing that her feelings can land somewhere in the middle between meaninglessness and all-encompassing.

“An ache passes through me when I hear the wistful longing in her voice. She’s so rarely vulnerable, it’s both wonderful and devastating to see this tiny crack in her armor.”

The juxtaposition here between wonderful and devastating captures the conflicting emotions that add tension to Connor and Fizzy’s relationship. These moments of vulnerability allow them to connect on a level besides sex and come to know and care for one another. Connor highlights the rarity of this vulnerability with his metaphor about cracked armor.

“Love is not found in a four-foot-high floral centerpiece or a seven-tiered chocolate cake. Real romance is in the quieter details.”

Fizzy shows she is developing a deeper understanding of love and romance, the novel’s central subject, in this interior monologue where she reflects that the symbols of a wedding aren’t actually a reflection of the couple’s love. She uses synecdoche here to represent weddings by their constituent parts—flowers and cake—which decenters weddings as the ultimate romantic symbol. This developing awareness shows her character growth: She is ready for a deeper emotional connection.

“There’s a universe expanding in my rib cage, stars and planets and all kinds of dangerous sparkling debris that could destroy me.”

This metaphor, comparing Fizzy’s emotional life and love for Connor to an expanding universe, also captures her apprehension at realizing she is in love for the first time. Space is simultaneously beautiful and dangerous, and she evokes meteor and asteroid imagery to describe the risk of being vulnerable and dependent on one another.

“I don’t need reminding. Every regrettable, overreactive moment of my meltdown is imprinted in my brain like a bad, drunken tattoo.”

Fizzy often gives in to her impulses and reacts in the moment, but this characteristic works against her when she reacts to Connor’s confession that he cheated on Nat. The metaphor of the drunken tattoo reflects her fear that falling for Connor was a poor decision that would have lasting damage.

“My entire life I’ve felt grounded in who I am and what I want, but lately…lately it feels like I have no identity anymore. […] And in all this quiet in my mind, the who am I really? shouts the loudest.”

Fizzy is left questioning her identity after the jolts to her writing, dating, and love life after Connor’s rejection. This lingering doubt is expressed through repetition, ellipses, and rhetorical questions, all of which replicate the feeling of turning a thought over and questioning things. That Connor brings out and appreciates all the sides of Izzy is a romance novel convention, in which love brings out the best in a person.

“The cameras haven’t captured this most beautiful of all story arcs: how this towering, intentional man and this small, chaotic woman came together first with friction and then with mutual admiration and then with something that felt a lot like love. I had the real story right in front of me this whole time.”

Fizzy casts the story of her and Connor in her own terms, writing their romance, so to speak, in a humorous but also poignant reflection of the genre she’s in—as a writer and a character in this story. The irony is that Fizzy doesn’t know at this point that the cameras have captured them, making this passage foreshadowing for the couple’s climactic reconciliation.

“No matter what poetry tells us, love isn’t always patient; it is urgent and hungry, eating up all of the blank space in my head.”

This passage is an allusion to 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 in the Bible, a passage that is frequently read in wedding ceremonies. While Connor believes his feelings contradict the Bible verse’s depiction of love (as patient, kind, and humble), the all-consuming nature of his feelings does correspond with the verse’s last line: “Love never fails.” The inclusion of this allusion foreshadows Connor and Fizzy ending up together.

“When I say that my heart aches and feels like it’s being stretched in opposite directions by two fists, I realize now that isn’t hyperbole. Love hurts.”

This passage describing Fizzy’s heartache, which uses the imagery of being stretched by fists, parallels and complements Connor’s suffering, which is described earlier. The characters pining for each other when they are apart makes the reconciliation at the end all the more satisfying to the romance arc.

“I did this show for some sort of jump start, inspiration, a change of perspective. I found something new inside me—the feeling of genuine love and passion—but unattended, I already feel it turning into a sharp spur in my thoughts, souring. In all my visions for the show, never did I come out of it sadder than I was before.”

Fizzy’s emotional low before the finale of the show creates a contrast to the emotional high that will come from the big reveal, raising the stakes before the couple’s reconciliation. Her spiraling feelings are represented on the page through the long sentences that stretch out through multiple clauses. This passage is a reminder that Fizzy has grown and changed over the course of the book.