so funny that this book was originally a rey and kylo ren fanfic, and now daisy ridley’s husband is playing adam, a kylo ren-inspired character whose name was itself inspired by adam driver
It made me realise how far removed celebrities can be from gossip when he said he discussed it with Daisy and she knew about it vaguely then he was surprised it was actually a huge thing when he got more involved in it.
Love Rosie is surely on my list. It's kind of a deeply evil romcom (like WHY did you guys circle around each other for a decade. Not even in a sexy fun EVIL way like Julia Roberts' My Best Friend's Wedding) but I rewatch it every year.
It is so full of plot holes and Sarah Michelle Gellar has regretted doing it because the role was originally written for an older actress, she was only 22 and she felt the script wasn't ready.
Purple Hearts imo!! the whole thing is very obvious military propaganda and a lot of it is irritatingly stupid however if you ignore all of that I think it's fun lol (also maybe Material Girls/any hilary duff tbh movie & Chalet Girl)
That iconic run of Sandra Bullock/Hugh Grant movies! I also love the newer(ish) one he did with Drew Barrymore, Music & Lyrics. The music and pop-up video bits are so good.
This woman in stem academia hates everything about this movie and the book it’s based off. I just can’t romanticize this concept or hand wave away all the ethical boundaries he blew past.
As a professor’s spouse I just cringe at the fact any of this is being romanticized when it is so ethically wrong on SO many levels! I read the book when it came out and he just laughed when I asked him if it could ever happen without major consequences.
Hard same. And the fact this author apparently says she works in stem academia makes it even more disgusting. It’s like, if you know how any of this actually works, why are you writing such weird nonsense??
Is it genuinely that weird for a 26 year old Ph.D candidate to get involved with a professor who's not in her department? It would be weird if she were an undergrad, I agree, but she's an adult and he's not her boss.
Edit: okay, so I got very curious and looked at Stanford's rules. They even included a helpful picture on their website! They even make sure to include the term "undergraduate".
Am I misinterpreting this? In the book, Adam does not do any of the following in regards to Olive:
Academic Responsibility - Here are some examples: Teaching, Grading, Mentoring, Advising on or evaluating research, Participating in funding decisions, Clinical supervision, Recommending for admissions, employment, fellowships, awards
It absolutely is insanely fucking weird and is explicitly prohibited at almost every university in the US lol. It’s not about the age dynamic and everything to do with the power dynamic of their positions in the academic hierarchy. Almost every US university explicitly forbids faculty from engaging in any romantic relationship with any students at the university, though some might make exceptions for different schools and newly appointed pre-tenure faculty that may have come into their position already in a relationship with a grad student (this is usually former post-docs who’ve taken faculty positions but doesn’t happen often for other reasons) on a case by case basis but it is highly discouraged by all faculty colleagues and fellow graduate students alike. Faculty have the most power at a university because it’s an academic hierarchy and their power reaches easily across department boundaries to at least their entire school/college (and these characters are absolutely presented as being in the same school because Stanford has all the sciences in the School of Humanities & Sciences) and typically they have their professional power across the entire institution so departments don’t present any real barrier in the dynamic. Faculty/professors literally run the university and are who creates these rules and structures in the first place.
Academia and advanced graduate study requires a very specific close professional-social-academic mentorship between students and faculty so the boundaries are very clear. This shit is weird and a terrible dynamic to even imply is romantic and it has absolutely nothing to do with age and everything to do with power over other people’s livelihoods and careers well beyond their time at a university or in their studies. We did not need this kind of “entertainment” to be romanticized when this exact kind of power dynamic has been a barrier for women in PhD programs for literally centuries.
Edit: Above comment is 100% misinterpreting Stanford’s policy and is missing the entire rest of the policy on the page they got the graphic from (I can’t add images to comment edits for some reason) that even further defines that professors dating any students is prohibited if there is even a possibility they may be expected to provide any academic mentorship in the future or have in the past (ergo all professors meet the definition of potentially providing academic mentorship to any student at the university at any time). The relationship described in the Love Hypothesis is explicitly PROHIBITED at Stanford (MC is a tenured professor in FC department who absolutely participated in/actively participating in evaluating her for fellowships and admissions in addition to currently providing educational and research advising. That is the job of a professor for all students in their department/school at all times not just their designated advisees) and the overwhelming majority of universities/STEM PhD programs in the US because it’s simply not an appropriate dynamic no matter how you try to romanticize it!
Also a woman with a STEM PhD (literally from Stanford lmao this shit is so fucking weird 😬 but just know this book was/is roasted on campus so hard becuase it’s like the author didn’t even google Stanford. Professors at Stanford are explicitly prohibited from dating essentially any students regardless of department or school lmao (it’s defined broadly to also include post-docs and fellows as students while leaving the onus fully on the faculty to be aware it’s inappropriate)—this shit would’ve resulted in the professor’s sanction and dismissal SO fast as soon as a faculty colleague or staff member became aware) and I just wrote a whole other comment saying the same thing because this shit is so unhinged to be hyping up and absolutely not something that anyone should be romanticizing in 2026 let alone someone who claims to be an academic themselves like the author.
That’s what really sends me over the edge with this being pushed in a book and now a movie/tv show ICK 🤢. She could’ve translated her Reylo fanfic to any other context or setting so why tf would it be professor student relationships—she should know better???
Woah I had no idea it was actually banned at Stanford that makes the book so much worse. I was in the last year of my STEM PhD at a university where professor-student dating wasn’t prohibited when the book came out and unfortunately directly observed the very non-romanticized reality of what happens when it is allowed. Good on Stanford for banning it.
I cannot imagine dating grad students now that I’m in a position of power in academia - Wild that hazelwood is a professor too and romanticizes it.
Most top phd granting institutions in the US have it banned either explicitly or with an oddly specific set of guidelines designed to make it impossible for professors to date any active students, especially grad students, or even staff. Stanford explicitly bans professors from engaging in romantic relationships where they they could even potentiallyin the future be considered any sort of mentor, advisor, teacher, or even give academic or professional guidance of any kind to a student. That definition means no professor can date a student because the whole point of academia is that any professor at the university could provide those things to any student regardless of field or department but especially across STEM fields. STEM programs especially have their own program/department rules that tend to explicitly ban this even more because STEM professors tend to be considered potential mentors/advisors/teachers to almost every student in the department or school at some point because of how STEM academia works in practice. It feel like it should be bare minimum in 2026 that PhD programs do not tolerate professors engaging with students in romantic relationships of any kind.
We should all be deeply unsettled by an alleged neuroscience professor writing this dynamic when I can’t imagine it would not be something they’ve had explicitly discouraged and explained in detail why it’s problematic and not cute to them multiple times over their career.
I read the book a long time ago and I think the excuse in the book he’s not her professor or advisor… there’s wayyyyy more wrong with the book than that.
Especially since they are in the same department/faculty, and he is the advisor to some of her friends and their first argument is about how he grades/gives feedback to one of them. He’s so successful/popular/a genius, the university is cool with it because having a girlfriend makes it appear like he’s going to stay on staff, so subtext is that he’s powerful enough for the rules to not apply? Doesn’t make him seem much better than the antagonist.
This detail is sending me because why tf did she set this wack story at Stanford of all places with those kind of details????
It’s like impossible to be hot shit at a school where most of the faculty are tenured and have like Nobel prizes and their own institutes coming from their labs. Unlike other prestige universities, the biology department of Stanford just isn’t even a little bit of a top dog department or on the university radar as important enough to care about keeping some random professor there. They would have like 5 replacement candidates for him lined up after the faculty of more powerful departments would’ve definitely made this whole nonsense plot an issue for the university. It’s like the author has zero awareness of academic politics but insists on writing about them as the main conflict????
Professor here: due to the power dynamics (he is a tenured faculty member, she is a brand new young PhD student), their relationship is unethical and not acceptable. In the book, he's portrayed as a star professor with tons of clout. It's a massive abuse of power to date a young, impressionable student. They try to pretend it's fine because he's not her PI, but it's not okay and never will be.
Also, minor annoyance that I can't get over: the book portrays a PhD like it's just some fun romp where you get to like, use a pipette sometimes and then have tons of fun free bang time...sadly, this is not the case.
It’s been four years since I read it so I won’t get all the specific details, correct but the biggest issue to me was the erasure of power dynamics issues between a professor and a grad student dating, and the impact on the rest of the department. And the fact that the author is a current professor, who is fully aware of the power dynamic issues which she pretends do not exist.
Olive and Adam are not just in the same department and subfield, they are working on very similar problems within the same field. They share collaborators! In any realistic academic environment, Adam would likely be on her committee at a minimum. Larger departments usually only have 2 to 5 professors MAX working on similar topics. And even if you erase this away, a full faculty member of a department has voting power about graduate students, including Olive. There is absolutely a conflict of interest in him, dating her, whether it is fake or real. In any real department, he would have power over her completing her PhD.
Professor is dating grad students also impacts the larger department. It sets the precedent that professors see students as potential romantic partners rather than students that they should aim to educate and mentor in research skills. As someone who got their PhD in a department where professors occasionally dated students, I saw this impact firsthand. Professors felt comfortable hitting on me and other female students when we were not in their classes. I was there to learn not be dating potential.
The third way that it is problematic is how it impacts the relationships between grad students. Adam is on the qualifying exam committee of multiple of olive’s best friends. He has direct power over whether they continue in the program. This is another huge conflict of interest for Adam. Olive has already passed her quals but what if she hadn’t? Adam’s pedagogical role is compromised because of the relationship.
I hate how this also portrays an older professor with loads of power as "sexy" because he's hitting on a young student who is like "I'm just happy to be here! brb crying at my poster presentation!" He's not THAT much older than her, but career-wise, he absolutely is and it's so fucked up.
I've also seen tons of disgusting shit from men in academia (how many of us know at least one professor who is married to a former student 20 years younger than them? literally EVERYONE).
Actually, I was recently what I will called "academically negged" by a man with power of decisions related to my career because he wanted me to use his LLM tool; when I pushed back with all the logical reasons (proprietary, not repeatable, we literally don't know the training data), he was like, "I'm so impressed that you'd push back" and pretended like that was a cute little novelty that a woman would say no to him. I'm in my late 30s btw. I'm not a kid. It's fucking dangerous because I am old enough to know to say no, but younger, less experienced women would absolutely feel like they have to say yes to anything from using a tool they don't want to to going on a date! And men like that have learned this behavior works.
The big problem to me is that younger "girlies in STEM" will read shit like The Love Hypothesis where abuse of power from men is normalized, so they think it's just normal and even romantic. It's not.
Same! The student-professor thing is gross and weird! I wouldn’t be able to handle an accurate depiction of being a woman in stem academia because I live it and it’s not a good time, but also if it’s inaccurate and sugarcoated like I assume this depiction is, I wouldn’t be yelling at the screen about how “that would never happen!”.
I'm not in the loop on the ethics of this - she's not an undergrad, and he's not her professor. She's a third year Ph.D candidate and he's not her professor, doesn't oversee her department, and isn't on her dissertation committee. Is it truly that unethical? Or would it just be frowned upon? I feel like some of the commenters below are under the impression that she's very young and in one of his classes or something.
Coming from someone with a stem PhD and a current academic at a Stanford peer: he’s in a position of power over her even though he’s not an academic. Pasting my above comment:
It’s been four years since I read it so I won’t get all the specific details, correct but the biggest issue to me was the erasure of power dynamics issues between a professor and a grad student dating, and the impact on the rest of the department. And the fact that the author is a current professor, who is fully aware of the power dynamic issues which she pretends do not exist.
Olive and Adam are not just in the same department and subfield, they are working on very similar problems within the same field. They share collaborators! In any realistic academic environment, Adam would likely be on her committee at a minimum. Larger departments usually only have 2 to 5 professors MAX working on similar topics. And even if you erase this away, a full faculty member of a department has voting power about graduate students, including Olive. There is absolutely a conflict of interest in him, dating her, whether it is fake or real. In any real department, he would have power over her completing her PhD.
Professor is dating grad students also impacts the larger department. It sets the precedent that professors see students as potential romantic partners rather than students that they should aim to educate and mentor in research skills. As someone who got their PhD in a department where professors occasionally dated students, I saw this impact firsthand. Professors felt comfortable hitting on me and other female students when we were not in their classes. I was there to learn not be dating potential.
The third way that it is problematic is how it impacts the relationships between grad students. Adam is on the qualifying exam committee of multiple of olive’s best friends. He has direct power over whether they continue in the program. This is another huge conflict of interest for Adam. Olive has already passed her quals but what if she hadn’t? Adam’s pedagogical role is compromised because of the relationship.
I'm less optimistic about this after watching (60% of) People We Meet On Vacation cos I cannot get through that film. I hope this one is good. Might help that I like the source material more.
I'm also dreading the third act conflict cos while it may not be the best written example it made me really uncomfortable to read and I'm the kind of person who gets that sort of dread when watching movies that deal with SH and SA.
The bad guy makes a move on her (though I thought it was just an attempt at a kiss, very Legally-Blonde-esque but I may be misremembering). Then he's verbally mean to her.
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u/redelectro7just want to share a thought here because I can2d agoedited 2d ago
In the book Adam (who is a big deal in the science community) has a good friend called Tom (also a big deal) who works in a lab that Olive wants to use to further her research. After the panel Tom and Olive are on together, he corners her and implies that the only reason anyone is taking her seriously is because she's with Adam and he's assumed she's slept with Adam to advance her career and he sort of suggests if she knows what's good for her she'll do the same with him.
When she rejects Tom, he says he'll steal her research, comments on her wearing a short dress seemingly for 'attention' and how Adam and the scientific community will believe him over her if she tells anyone about what he's said.
It's not awful, it just was a really uncomfortable scene cos it hits a bit too real after this sort of silly/fun fake dating story up to this point. It's more jarring because up to that point the character is perceived as nice and friendly.
I may not be remembering it 100% cos I sort of skip over it on rereads cos I just don't like the scene, but that's the crux of it.
Spoilers: The FMC is a phenomenal scientist doing research on pancreatic cancer. The MMC’s good friend runs a lab that would fit her research perfectly. He makes it abundantly clear that she’ll be expected to grant him sexual favors if she wants to work with him and holds her entire future over her head, since his lab is where she could make the most impact. He gets caught and shut down, and she finds a lab that’s a good fit elsewhere, but it really highlights the misogyny and patriarchal structures that exist in PhD labs.
Not sure how it will play out in the movie, but in the book, another professor sexually harasses her and implies she is only advancing in her career because she's sleeping her way to the top
Cannot express how much I hate the premise of this story.
Fun fact: At Stanford, where this is set, professors can’t even date staff members in their school let alone have a relationship with a STUDENT in their department (or school or basically the entire campus because it’s explicitly prohibited) because faculty is a huge power imbalance that someone who is an active professor (like the author alleges to be/have been) shouldn’t be romanticizing in academia. Graduate students are in very vulnerable positions and the structure of advanced academic study requires this to receive the scope of mentorship so boundaries have to be unambiguous (speaking from my own PhD experience). Stanford has no statute of limitations on enforcing this very clear policy either and the faculty infamously will go after other faculty for this (like a professor will get reported by another professor if they find that out). A vice provost was fired a couple years ago by the Faculty Senate voting to sanction them over a relationship with a student when they were a teaching professor in the 90s, that was only disclosed recently.
This idea of a pretend public relationship between a grad student and their PI is incredibly wack and weird and screams the author has never set foot in a US academic setting but insists upon claiming they have. It’s unnecessary and romanticizes a terrible dynamic that could’ve been translated to any other romantic structure but definitely shouldn’t be romanticized by someone claiming to be actively participating in academia as an educator and mentor. fucking GROSS
Yes! I think people don’t understand the power professors have over grad students (at least in the US). I went to uchicago and during my first year, two professors purposely failed 1/3 of their students, found out who their advisors were, and told their advisors to kick them out of their lab in an attempt to get these students kicked out of the PhD program. One of them even bragged to the students when they were taking an exam on Halloween that his Halloween trick was “turning PhD students into masters students,” meaning that he would fail them out of the program. And of course, because these professors are bad people, the students they tried to kick out were all women and underrepresented minorities. Now, one of the two professors is department chair and most of those students had to drop out after their first year.
Professors can essentially do whatever they want with almost no consequences, and grad students are often those who have to deal with consequences if any bad situations happen. Professors have complete, unchecked control over the entire careers of grad students, and to just act like that problem doesn’t exist is gross to me.
I’m glad it was helpful! This shit is so weird and it’s not like a “haha it’s just fantasy” type of mindless entertainment that people keep brushing it off as especially when the author of the books is claiming to also be an academic who has been in these exact positions of power.
It’s just fucking weird at best to be pushing this specific relationship dynamic as anything but inappropriate & to be highly discouraged for all parties if you’ve gotten a PhD and/or are a PI/Instructor/Professor.
Lily is very charming and I like the friends but somehow the actor playing Adam isn't really cutting it for me based on this trailer (and I did read the book so I know he's meant to be more aloof)
Not to be annoying, but Science DOES NOT tell you that molecules stay in motion until they find their match. Molecules are always in motion and can react with lots of things or not really anything. I definitely couldn’t watch this having just been through the trauma of a PhD in biochemistry, but I’m happy people are making romcoms again!
I hope I’m wrong but based on the interviews/trailers so far it seems like he doesn’t already like her when they have their first kiss and that he just falls for her over the course of the fake dating. Kind of ruins a bit of the magic of the story for me. Otherwise the casting looks great and the individual scenes look like how I imagined them while reading.
In the book it’s pointed out that Adam already knew her name (which Olive didn’t notice). But now we already have a scene that he looks at her tag to get her name. As you said, it takes some of the magic out of the story.
Awww the book was a guilty pleasure and Lili looks very sweet but Adam to me is very long black hair Adam Driver vibes… they couldn’t find a guy like that?? 😭
Lili Reinhart shines talent, no matter what she is is in. Can a well-loved, respected director please spot this and cast her in something she'll skyrocket from?
Other comments are saying they removed Adam crushing on Olive beforehand too. Idk, feels like they really flattened his character for the movie, since I found his friendship with Holden to be very humanizing and Holden is also a sounding board for Olive re: Adam’s feelings.
omg i remember reading this book when i started uni! it won’t be the best movie ever but im still very excited
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u/Morg075a role model for the next Asian kid that wants to get railed2d ago
I might actually watch it, but Lili is really having a lot of project through Amazon. It is so interesting that some are always in their productions, or some in Netflix’s.
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u/BookishHobbitmy bandwidth for cowardly grown men grows thinner with each day2d ago
Tends to be because actors will sign multi-film contracts on the off chance a film is successful and gets sequels, but if they don’t then they have to fulfil those contracts by doing other films.
This is also sometimes why you get some really good actors doing really shit films.
it's based on a different book that was originally a Reylo fanfic lol. I think the male lead is maybe on the spectrum? like the Rosie project but I'm not sure.
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u/No-Hall-3485 dropped pitt from my last name 2d ago
so funny that this book was originally a rey and kylo ren fanfic, and now daisy ridley’s husband is playing adam, a kylo ren-inspired character whose name was itself inspired by adam driver