Olive Smith is the main character and protagonist of The Love Hypothesis. She struggles with her self-image and tends to focus on all the ways she feels messy, rather than all the accomplishments she achieves. Since her mother died 10 years ago, she’s been alone, and her professional life is driven by the desire “to be less lonely” (8). After meeting Anh at their Stanford orientation and later Malcolm, Olive feels close to people for the first time in a long time, but her years of being by herself make it difficult for her to understand that people want to be around her. By extension, she struggles with the idea of people caring, even as Anh, Malcolm, and Adam continually show their support. She attributes her difficulties to being “wrong” in some way, demonstrating how her life events have had an impact on her that make her emotions difficult for her to confront.

While Olive is a genius with her work, she lacks emotional intelligence. She concocts a fake-dating scenario so Anh can date Jeremy without feeling badly, which leads to negative consequences that eventually tumble down around her. Through Olive, The Love Hypothesis shows the struggles of being out-of-touch emotionally and the consequences of emotional avoidance.