The True Love Experiment

Connor is the deuteragonist and the second narrator of the novel. He is a 33-year-old white man with green eyes and unruly black hair that he tames with gel for work, which to Fizzy looks like a Lego brick. He is tall and muscular, with “[w]hite gleaming teeth, glimmering eyes that would get the sparkle sound effect in a cartoon, and muscles bunchy and flexing under his white dress shirt” (34). He is attractive and charismatic, as proven by his popularity among viewers when Fizzy gets him to appear on the TV show by running the confessional interviews.

Connor grew up in Blackpool, England, and was raised by his mother. His father lives in the US and married another woman with whom he had children. Though his father is a multimillionaire who owns a real estate development firm, Connor grew up in relative poverty. At 15, after an accident gave his mother severe anxiety, he came to the United States to live with his father and stepfamily. The relationship with his father did not improve, and Connor feels his father has always criticized him, particularly for turning down his offer to work in his firm. Instead, Connor paid his own way through UCLA with work and scholarships, then attended the University of Southern California to study film. He works for North Star making documentaries about social and political issues, including climate change and the health of marine mammals.

Fizzy thinks of him as “this open, curious, steady man” (159), but she has met the mature Connor who has worked hard to become so. His past is a different story. He became involved with Nat in college out of convenience as they were part of the same social group. When she became pregnant, Connor married her, but he realized he was not in love and that their marriage would be passionless. To get Nat to break up with him, Connor cheated on her with another woman, and they divorced when their daughter, Stevie, was two. Connor is ashamed of the immature way he acted and has gone to therapy to deal with his guilt. When Nat moved to San Diego from Los Angeles, he moved also to be close to Stevie and spend time with her on the weekends. He tries to be a consistent and reliable parent, as shown by his willingness to coach her soccer team.

Though his dating life has suffered because he prioritizes his job and time with Stevie and has also learned that he’s not really drawn to casual sex, Connor is open to love and quickly falls for Fizzy’s humor and charisma. He listens to her and is open to her ideas, which leads to him reading her romance novels and changing his opinion of the genre and her work. Connor is honest and vulnerable with her throughout, which includes admitting when he is attracted, when he is jealous, and when he is worried he can’t trust her. Despite being a relatively private person, Connor shows that his love for Fizzy has changed him and encourages him to take risks when he comes on stage during the finale of The True Love Experiment to show her the footage he has edited declaring his love for her.

Jessica was the protagonist of The Soulmate Equation, the previous Christina Lauren novel that featured her falling in love with River Peña, the inventor of the DNADuo technology that helps people find matches. In this novel, Jess is a supporting character who plays the role of mentor and guide for Fizzy. She provides a model of a passionate, successful relationship with a handsome man and co-parent of a young daughter, the model Fizzy has to look forward to if she gets involved with Connor. Jess provides the sounding board that helps Fizzy work through her emotional obstacles and offers a supportive community that shows that Fizzy already has an established, successful life and only lacks a supportive partner of her own.

Jess loves reality dating shows, which is the TV equivalent of loving romance novels. This provides an additional motivation for Fizzy wanting to make The True Love Experience interesting, authentic, and fun. Jess shares Fizzy’s trait of honesty and is frank with her friend. She provides foreshadowing and tension for the reader when she sees Fizzy’s growing emotional attachment to Connor before Fizzy is ready to admit she’s interested in more than sex. Jess is the contrast and foil who offers a more practical, grounded outlook to balance Fizzy’s effervescence. This shows in their passions; Jess loves working with numbers, and Fizzy loves telling stories. Jess also contributes to the humor of the novel, matching Fizzy’s gift for wit, sarcasm, and innuendos.

Nat is a secondary character who provides a contrast and a foil to Fizzy. As Connor’s ex-wife, she represents the relationship in his past that didn’t work out, but she also allows Connor to demonstrate his maturity in the friendship they have developed while co-parenting Stevie. Nat is intelligent, kind, and caring. She provides a check to Connor’s assumptions about romance by informing him she enjoys the genre and by protesting when he shows his condescension. Nat foreshadows Connor’s own love connection by falling in love with Insu, a younger man who is devoted to her and Stevie. That Connor is not threatened by Insu shows that he understands his place in Nat’s life and has also moved on, even though he allows her to nurture him occasionally by giving him a place to sleep, making him meals, and being his sounding board when he wants to talk about Fizzy.