Efficient Love

Efficient Love™
I Had 1,200 First Dates So You Don’t Have To™

“I had 1,200 first dates” is the kind of sentence that makes reasonable people squint. It sounds like a brag. It sounds like a gimmick. And if I hadn’t lived it, I’d probably doubt it too. But here’s the truth most people miss: I didn’t set out to have more dates – and I definitely didn’t set out to have more one-night stands. I was already going on too many dates that sounded good online and/or on the phone, but didn’t turn out to be compatible in real life.

And that incompatibility wasn’t always “my decision.” Sometimes it didn’t fit for me. Sometimes it didn’t fit for her. And just as often, it didn’t fit for either of us once we were sitting across the table and the real humans showed up. The time cost was huge. The emotional cost was real. And the disappointment was unfair to both people. I wasn’t looking for “more options.” I was trying to find a way to stop wasting good people’s time – including my own.

So I tried something that was unusual for the time. I built a simple webpage and called it NovelistSeeksHeroine.com. This was early-internet territory, when people still wrote long emails and actually meant what they said. I added the link to my AOL profile, wrote a short description of who I was, and made a simple promise: if you clicked through to the webpage, you’d find the 28 attributes I believed mattered most for long-term compatibility. (They were not in my AOL profile. They lived on the webpage.)

NovelistSeeksHeroine.com – Original Splash Screen

And there was one other place I put that link. As I recall, I was a charter member of Match.com when it first launched (around April 1995). For whatever reason, they gave me a free account, which was unusual for a male at the time (and I honestly don’t remember why). My Match.com profile was just like my AOL profile: short, limited, and pointing to one thing – the NovelistSeeksHeroine.com site.

That was it. I didn’t run ads. I didn’t buy traffic. I didn’t do any marketing campaigns. The AOL profile link and the early Match.com link were the only two intentional “distribution channels” I used. Everything else that happened came from word-of-mouth and referrals – people telling other people, “You have to see this.”

I also included a line from my past that became an unexpected signal: I had worked for NASA as a physicist – but that had been a couple of decades earlier. I was not a rocket scientist then. It was simply part of my history. Still, people loved the idea of a former NASA physicist trying to bring structure to love, and the joke wrote itself: this was exactly the kind of approach you’d expect from a “rocket scientist.”

I assumed the page might get a few hundred visits. I thought it would act like a filter. A way to reduce the noise. A way to create fewer, better first dates.

Instead, over time it drew an estimated two million visits, and roughly fifteen thousand women wrote to me believing they might be my Heroine. That was a lot of people back then. And I don’t mean “likes.” I mean real emails. Real effort. Real hope. Somewhere in the middle of that wave, I remember thinking, very clearly, “Robert, you’re gonna need a bigger website,” and my brain was humming the Jaws theme.

And here’s the part that mattered most: the attention wasn’t flattering. It was weight. Because every message was a real person on the other side. Every response represented someone making themselves vulnerable. And I felt responsible for that – not in a transactional way, and not in a “look at me” way, but in the simplest human way: if someone offers you their story, their hopes, their time, and their heart, you don’t get to treat it like a game.

Then something else happened that I never expected. I became a kind of early-internet “Dear Abby.” I started receiving so many emails asking for dating advice that both men and women began writing me – not just about whether they were compatible with me, but about their own relationships, their own heartbreaks, their own confusion, and the very real fear of getting it wrong again.

Eventually, the volume became too large for me to respond to everyone individually. So I did the only thing I could think of that felt fair and useful: I began selecting a handful of letters and publishing them on Novelist Seeks Heroine – along with my answers, recommendations, and suggestions. Over time, that turned into a growing public archive of real questions from real people, answered as thoughtfully and humanely as I knew how.

Over the next decade, those exchanges added up to thousands of people I reached back out to personally – helping coach them through some of the most emotional and intimate topics humans ever face. It started with the compatibility Lists and first-date patterns. But it grew into something much larger: clarity, self-honesty, boundaries, emotional alignment, self-respect, and how to stop repeating the same heartbreak with a different face.

Over the next decade, the numbers became almost absurd:

  • Over 2 million visitors in the early days of the internet – right before the turn of the century (2000, not 1900!).
  • More than 15,000 responses from women who believed they might be my Heroine.
  • 1,200 real-world first dates, and over 300 second dates – and beyond.
  • Dozens of those first dates became lifelong friendships that have lasted decades – including many where we never made it to the second romantic date.

And out of all of that, one result still makes me smile:

  • Exactly one woman was asked to marry me.
  • She said yes.
  • We’ve been married for more than twenty years, and still happily counting.

Here’s what I learned along the way. Chemistry is loud, and compatibility is quiet – until it’s not. That’s when the deal-killers usually start showing up: the value mismatch, the money mismatch, the lifestyle mismatch, the intimacy mismatch, the “how you handle stress” mismatch. With my approach, I wanted to find the deal-killers upfront for both of us. And honestly, I became as interested in hearing what was on her three Lists as I was in sharing mine.

That led to many meaningful, heartfelt, and genuinely enjoyable first dates – even when it meant there was no long-term romance in store for either of us together. And that became one of the real lessons: it didn’t matter what either of us found important – we both had the right to make it important. I say this a lot, because it’s the foundation of mature compatibility: There are no wrong answers. Just different answers.

Along the way, I also discovered that my original “28 attributes” were necessary but not sufficient. I needed three Lists, because real compatibility lives in more than one dimension:

  • The Profound List (general characteristics and attributes).
  • The Profane List (what was needed and/or required for genuine and mutual sexual compatibility).
  • The DIDO List (all of the uncountable day-in, day-out requirements of real life: lifestyle, money requirements, status requirements, religious compatibility, kiddo compatibility, and everything else that becomes your actual life together).

Efficient Love™ is the book that distills what I learned into something you can use without needing 1,200 first dates.

What Efficient Love™ Is (and Isn’t)

This is not:

  • A conquest memoir.
  • A collection of dating war stories.
  • A brag about numbers.

This is:

  • A guide to defining compatibility in clear, practical terms.
  • A way to understand your own patterns in love – who you choose, why you stay, and why you leave.
  • A framework for evaluating relationships early, kindly, and honestly.
  • A method for reducing needless heartbreak without shutting down your heart.

Core Themes in the Book

  • Clarity before chemistry: how to know what you’re actually looking for before you start searching.
  • Emotional readiness: why timing and internal alignment matter more than surface traits.
  • Patterns and repetition: how we unconsciously recreate the same relationship with different people.
  • The original 28 attributes: updated with years of hindsight, nuance, and hard-won humility.
  • Efficient filtering: how to ask better questions earlier, so both people waste less time.
  • Staying or leaving: how to make those decisions with more courage and less self-sabotage.

Who This Book Is For

  • Single people tired of starting over again and again without understanding why.
  • Divorced readers who want to build something healthier next time.
  • Those in a relationship who quietly wonder, “Is this actually right for me long-term?”
  • Therapists, coaches, and matchmakers who want a structured lens to help their clients think more clearly.

And yes, it’s also for romantics who still believe in deep love – but want to pursue it intelligently.

A Note About Tone

Efficient Love™ is not cynical. It’s not bitter. It doesn’t tell you that love is a numbers game or that you should turn your dating life into a spreadsheet.

It says:

“Your heart deserves both hope and protection. Let’s give it both.”

Join the Efficient Love™ Advance Reader Community (ARC)

Efficient Love™ is currently in development. You can engage at two levels:

Efficient Love™ Early Interest List

  • Receive updates as chapters are completed
  • Get your “key” to the restored Novelist Seeks Heroine™ archives
  • Be notified when preorders and launch dates are set

Join the Efficient Love™ Early Interest List

Efficient Love™ Advance Reader Community (ARC)

  • Read early drafts
  • Offer feedback, questions, and corrections
  • Help refine the three-List framework for today’s world
  • Receive the final ebook free on launch
  • Choose whether to be thanked by name in the Acknowledgments on the book’s webpage, in the Acknowledgments section of the book, or both

Apply for the Efficient Love™ Advance Reader Community (ARC)

If any part of this story makes you think, “I wish I’d had this ten years ago,” then you’re exactly the kind of reader whose voice I want shaping this book.