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 would probably doubt it too.
But here is 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 certainly 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 significant. The emotional cost was real. The disappointment was unfair to both people. Over time, that pattern creates something heavier than heartbreak. It creates quiet doubt. It erodes confidence. It makes you question your instincts. It makes you wonder whether you are the common denominator in the wrong way. It makes starting over feel exhausting.
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. If you clicked through, you found the 28 attributes I believed mattered most for my personal long-term compatibility. The 28 attributes lived on the webpage. I listed the link to my website on my AOL profile and did the same to my Match.com profile, with the enticement on both saying something like, “Are you the Heroine this Novelist seeks? Find out by checking out my webpage NovelistSeeksHeroine.com.” I made a simple promise: “If you believe you match all 28 traits, write to me and include the traits your own Hero would need to match.”
That was it. I didn’t run ads. I didn’t buy traffic. The AOL profile and the early Match.com profile were the only two intentional distribution channels. Everything else 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 decades earlier. I was not a rocket scientist at that point. It was simply part of my history. Still, people loved the idea of a former NASA physicist trying to bring structure to love. The joke wrote itself.
I assumed the page might attract a few hundred visits.
Instead, it drew an estimated 2 million visitors (that was a huge number back in those days between 1994-2004.) That simple website ended up generating more than 15,000 responses from women who believed they might be my Heroine.
Here was the first hard lesson: many of those women were not describing who they actually were. They were describing who they wanted to be. They projected my 28 traits onto themselves because they liked the idea of being that woman. That was mostly my fault because each trait had an enticing and provocative adjective that apparently were adjectives that a lot of women wanted to have. It was also my fault that, unintentionally, each trait was too ambiguous and subjective, making it too easy to misinterpret. It took time – and more first dates than I care to admit – to learn how to distinguish aspiration from embodiment. Between potential and pattern.
That is how I eventually went on 1,200 first dates over roughly ten years.
What 1,200 First Dates Actually Looked Like
Probably over two thirds of these first dates were face-to-face, in-real-life meetings. Many were short thirty-minute coffee dates designed intentionally as low-pressure chemistry checks. Some required long drives. When I was living in Dallas or Austin, Texas, a “quick visit” could mean several hours behind the wheel. Texas is one of those states where driving from one end to the other can take fifteen hours.
Later, when I was living directly on the beach at Clearwater Beach, Florida, the dynamic shifted when my profile picture changed to one taken of me on the balcony of my condo showing my 180° panoramic view of the Gulf of Mexico. Once the website showed that location, I remember receiving over one hundred emails almost immediately from women claiming to be perfect matches and eager to come “visit” for a first date.
More about that in the book…Hint: It was highly doubtful whether any of those were actually interested in me…except for one exception…
A significant portion of the 1,200 “first dates” were live video dates long before iPhones or FaceTime were common. These were scheduled only after substantive email exchanges suggested there might be mutual alignment across what eventually became the Six Lists – my three and her three. The email responses I was getting were so massive that I rarely, if ever, had a video call with someone I didn’t believe was a mutual match. I didn’t have the time. And, frankly, I got where I did not want to end up with strong mutual chemistry that would once again turn into another dead-end relationship. So for me, these live video dates were ones I considered to be genuine dates. In today’s world, 20+ years later, I certainly understand the perspective is different. However, back then, as today, most of you know how powerful online romantic relationships can become – even if you never meet.
Many of those video conversations were the virtual equivalent of a short coffee date. Chemistry, or the absence of it, can absolutely come across through live video if you are paying attention – even when their side of the video was only performative. Most ended politely. Others accelerated into in-person meetings. Some never became romantic but turned into lifelong friendships. Others began romantically and later evolved into meaningful friendships that still exist more than twenty years later.
Dozens of the 1,200 resulted in genuine, meaningful relationships that remain ongoing friendships decades later. Some never turned romantic. Some were romantic for a season. Some were among the most meaningful romantic relationships of my life. What mattered was that the honest and kind approach rarely burned bridges permanently, even when there were the usual breakup emotions.
Let’s Talk Honestly About Chemistry
Overwhelming, electrifying chemistry was not present on all 1,200 first dates. Not even close.
It was not always “chemistry at first sight.” Sometimes it built gradually. Out of 1,200 first dates, roughly 300 became second dates. In those 300, there was always at least some mutual spark.
But the kind of true, mutual, knock-your-socks-off physical and mental chemistry people imagine when they think of rare connection probably occurred for me maybe three or four dozen times. Of those, perhaps a Top Twenty stood distinctly above the rest.
Two – and almost three – of those Top Twenty were so powerfully and mutually magnetic that one breakup did not stick. In all cases, I knew it was a mistake. In one case, there were two reconciliations. In another, we lost count after more than half a dozen reconciliations. More than once one of us would say, “This doesn’t mean we’re getting back together again…” and we would both laugh at the absurdity of even trying to pretend that was true.
In both cases, there was eventually a final ending. Genuine irreconcilable differences rarely, if ever, become permanently unimportant. And yes, those detours delayed all of us in finding the right person for Ever After. But maybe, sometimes, that delay might, just maybe, be worth it.
More about all of that in the book…
During my own ten-year Odyssey, I often thought about Homer’s Odyssey. Ulysses spent twenty years trying to return home. Along the way, he was delayed not only by storms and monsters but by enchantment. Circe held him for a year. Calypso held him for seven. He was not forced to stay. He was seduced by something powerful enough to pause the Quest.
Massive mutual chemistry can feel like that enchantment.
The Three Lists
My original 28 traits were necessary but not sufficient. As my Methodology framework evolved, I realized compatibility lives in multiple dimensions.
- The Profound List – core character and values.
- The Profane List – explicit, genuine, comprehensive, nuanced and raw mutual sexual compatibility.
- The DIDO List – the day-in, day-out realities of shared life.
You have your three lists. They have their three lists. Together, that actually creates Six Lists per couple.
Here’s the important part you cannot miss: for each couple, six lists must be compatible. It’s not enough for her to be totally compatible with me – and it’s not enough for me to be totally compatible with her. This is probably one of the most important axioms to learn and live by. If you cheat, somebody’s not going to be happy, and it is probably going to be both of you.
(Hint: When these lists were discussed, the 15,000 and the 1,200 almost always guessed wrong when I asked which one was where all the deal killers lived.)
One of the great advantages of the Methodology is that you instantly have something meaningful to talk about without reverting to small talk. I usually began by focusing on the most interesting person at the meeting. Not me. I already knew all about me. I wanted to know all about her.
I might ask, “What are a couple of things that you left off your lists that you probably should have included if you wanted to make absolutely sure you ended up with the right guy?”
Or I would say, “I want you to actually end up with the very best match you can possibly have based on your three lists. That may or may not be me. We’ll find out sooner or later. For right now, out of all the traits on your lists, which ones have been the hardest to find a real match for?”
Those conversations often became the best first dates I ever had, even when her lists strayed far from who I was or what I wanted. What mattered most to me was that she left knowing herself more clearly and understanding her needs without manipulation or subterfuge on my part.
The book walks you step by step through building your own ThreeLists so you can apply this structure without spending ten years discovering it the hard way.
What Readers Experienced
While the site was active, thousands wrote to say the Methodology helped them get off the treadmill of endless sequential dating. Some reported engagements and marriages that emerged quickly because they addressed compatibility and incompatibility early instead of discovering them years later. One couple married within thirty days of meeting. More than twenty years later, they are still married.
Others wrote with harder stories. Some used the Methodology inside their marriages and uncovered irreconcilable differences that had always been there. Some of those marriages ended. That reality hit me hard and made it clear this was never a game.
A surprising number of readers, both men and women, wrote me about their focus was primarily on the Profane List because they were not seeking long-term partnership at all. They wanted extraordinary sexual compatibility with nuances and desires that ranged from one horizon to the other without commitment. Interestingly, some of those relationships later evolved into something deeper as Profound and DIDO alignment emerged during quieter seasons together.
I also became aware that any structured system can be misused. Just as I encountered individuals with less than honest intentions in my own journey, I have no doubt that some may have used the Methodology manipulatively.
More about that in the book…
One of my genuine surprises, though it should not have been, was the significant correspondence from men and women in the gay community. The Methodology worked equally well there. Love, desire, compatibility, projection, and heartbreak are not confined to any single demographic.
The Ending of My Ten-Year Odyssey
Like Ulysses, I eventually found the home that was my Quest. My Novelist Seeks Heroine website completed its mission.
There was one and only one Heroine for me out of the 15,000, only one woman out of the 1,200, who I asked to marry me.
More than TWO DECADES later, we are still happily married…and still counting!
We continue pursuing our joint quest together: Make every single day and night Happily Here and Now so that they combine into a genuinely mutual Happily Ever After.
Join the Efficient Love™ Advance Reader Team
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If you simply want updates – and access to something that has not been publicly available for over two decades – join below.
The original NovelistSeeksHeroine.com website still exists. I have the original code. It runs exactly as it did in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It is not archived. It is not searchable. It is not indexed.
It is not publicly accessible.
The site has been quietly restored — but access is restricted.
Inside are the original essays, compatibility lists, reader letters, and the full early framework that ultimately evolved into Efficient Love™.
Most of it has not been seen since before we were married.
No public announcement. No search result. No reposting on social media.
If you want the private key to access it, join below.
Thanks,
Robert
POSTSCRIPT
[Nota Bene: Since there, invariably, always seems to be a massive interest in the detailed back story behind this decade-long quest, I’ve included this PostScript that provides private information that I have never shared before.]
If you’re curious where much of the thinking behind these books actually came from, there’s a deeper backstory that most people have never seen.
When I went back last week and reinstalled the archived website and began exploring the hundreds of pages that grew out of the very first, single-page version of NovelistSeeksHeroine.com, I felt not just a passing sense of embarrassment, but something much more layered than that. There was a kind of dissonance between how raw and unfinished so much of it looks by today’s standards and how real, how immediate, and how consequential those pages actually were at the time they were created.
Most of what you will see there is more than three decades old, and very little has been updated, redesigned, or cleaned up to make it more presentable. What remains is exactly what it was as it unfolded, which means you are not stepping into something that has been curated or polished for effect. You are stepping into a record of something that was happening in real time, without the benefit of hindsight, without a team, and without any sense that it would eventually become the foundation for a book, much less a broader body of work.
At the beginning, it was simply an idea that felt both obvious and slightly absurd: define what I was actually looking for in a lifelong partner with unusual precision and see what would happen if I made that search completely transparent. What followed was neither gradual nor manageable in any conventional sense. The responses did not come in a steady stream that could be handled comfortably. They arrived with the force of something that had been waiting for a place to land, and suddenly had one.
I found myself reading and responding to an ever-growing volume of messages that had nothing to do with my personal quest. These other messages ranged from hopeful to confused, from deeply thoughtful to painfully honest, from curious to quietly desperate. These were not abstract questions about dating. They were people trying to understand why relationships that looked promising kept failing, why certain patterns seemed to repeat no matter how much effort they invested, and whether it was possible to recognize something real early enough to avoid losing years to something that was never going to work.
Because I had no infrastructure to handle any of this, I built everything myself as I went. I learned HTML on the fly because there was no alternative if I wanted to keep up. I created page after page in response to what people were asking, trying to organize the chaos into something that might be useful to the next person who arrived with the same question. There was no editorial calendar, no system, and no separation between thinking and publishing. If something needed to be said, I wrote it and put it up immediately, often late at night, knowing there were already more messages waiting than I could reasonably answer.
Somewhere in the middle of that, without any intention of it ever happening, I became a kind of relationship sounding board for a very large number of people who were trying to make sense of something that mattered to them more than almost anything else in their lives. The closest comparison is to the “Dear Abby” role, but even that doesn’t fully capture it, because this wasn’t anonymous advice offered at a distance. These were ongoing exchanges with real people making real decisions, and then coming back to share what happened as a result.
What I witnessed during that time changed the way I understood relationships, decision-making, and human behavior more broadly. I saw couples who followed my methodology come together and move with astonishing speed toward commitment, sometimes marrying in less than 30 days because the level of alignment was so clear that hesitation no longer made sense. I also saw people follow the same principles just as carefully and realize, just as quickly, that they were fundamentally mismatched, which allowed them to walk away before investing more years of their lives in something that would have slowly come apart anyway.
Those outcomes were not theoretical and not distant. They were immediate, and they carried weight. At a certain point, it stopped feeling like an interesting experiment and became something that required a level of seriousness I had not anticipated when I began.
What makes that period even more unusual in hindsight is that none of this was my primary profession. During the day, I worked as a management consultant with startups around the world, helping founders and leadership teams think through strategy, capital formation, execution, and the difficult decisions that determine whether something grows or fails under pressure. In the evenings, I was immersed in a completely different set of conversations, helping people think through compatibility, alignment, expectations, identity, and the far more personal decisions that determine whether a relationship deepens or unravels.
There is another layer to that experience that almost nobody sees when they first hear the numbers, and it is one of the most important reasons this ever became something far more meaningful than an unusual personal story.
Very early on, it became clear to me that if people were not completely honest about what they wanted, not just emotionally but sexually, then everything else we were trying to do would eventually fall apart. It didn’t matter how thoughtful someone was, how well they communicated, or how strong the initial connection felt. If there was a gap between what they truly wanted and what they were willing to say out loud, that gap would not disappear over time. It would widen, and it would eventually surface in ways that were far more difficult to deal with later.
So I made something explicit that most people never make explicit.
One of the core matching criteria was a fully candid, unfiltered list of sexual wants, preferences, boundaries, and non-negotiables. Not a softened version full of ambiguities, not something edited to sound acceptable, and not something designed to avoid discomfort. The real version, written as honestly as possible, because without that level of beneath everything else I have written, particularly in Reset Protocol, where many of those same patterns show up again in a different form asclarity, everything else rested on assumptions that were almost guaranteed to be wrong.
For most people, that level of honesty is uncomfortable to consider, let alone to write down and share. But once people realized that this was a place where they could actually be direct without being judged or managed, something shifted in a way I did not anticipate at the beginning. They stopped editing themselves. They began saying what they actually wanted, what they actually did not want, what had worked for them, what had failed for them, and what they were no longer willing to compromise on simply to keep a relationship intact.
When you see that kind of honesty, not from one person or a handful of couples, not even just from the 15,000 who thought they might be my Heroine, but from tens of thousands of other individuals who visited this website over an extended period of time, patterns begin to emerge that are almost impossible to see any other way. You begin to understand how often people enter into relationships despite major sexual incompatibilities that are either never discussed at all or quietly pushed aside in the hope that they will somehow resolve themselves. You begin to see how frequently something that feels powerful at the beginning is mistaken for something that is actually aligned, and how often that confusion leads to frustration, resentment, or slow erosion later on.
At the same time, you also begin to see the opposite. When alignment is real and visible, when people are clear with themselves and with each other from the beginning, connection can accelerate in a way that feels both surprising and completely natural. There is less second-guessing, less negotiation around core needs, and far less wasted time trying to make something work that was never going to work in the first place.
Seeing both sides of that at scale changes how you understand relationships, which is where Efficient Love comes from. It is built not on theory but on observing what actually holds up and what consistently falls apart when people are either honest or not about what matters most to them.
That same body of experience also changes how you understand decision-making more broadly. You begin to see how often people choose paths that do not fully fit them, how they rationalize those choices, and how long they are willing to live with that misalignment before they finally acknowledge it. That is the same underlying pattern that shows up in Reset Protocol when someone realizes that the direction they are moving in no longer reflects what they actually want, even if it once did.
And it especially extends into the sexual explicitness required for multiple plot arcs in Stark Naked Startup, because once you understand how quickly connection can intensify when alignment is real, and how powerful and disorienting that acceleration can feel, it becomes much easier to imagine how something that begins between two people can expand outward into something much larger, much faster than anyone involved originally expects.
Very few people ever have the opportunity to see that level of honesty across that many lives, and once you have seen it, it becomes very difficult to go back to thinking that these aspects of compatibility, alignment, and decision-making are secondary or something that can safely be figured out later.
Because you have already seen what happens when they are not.
Over time, it became impossible to ignore the fact that these were not separate domains. The patterns began to overlap in ways that were too consistent to dismiss. The same kinds of misalignment that undermine a relationship show up in careers, in business partnerships, and in life direction. The same tendency to ignore early signals, to rationalize discomfort, or to delay difficult clarity appears in every one of those contexts. The same gap between what people say they want and what they actually choose plays out again and again, whether the subject is love, work, or identity.
That accumulation of observation, experience, and pattern recognition is what I now think of as Compound Knowledge™. It did not come from formal study in this area, nor from a single controlled framework. It emerged from being immersed in tens of thousands of real situations where the outcomes mattered deeply to the people involved and where the consequences of being wrong were measured in years of someone’s life.
That body of experience became the foundation for Efficient Love, but it also runs quietly underneath everything else I have written, particularly Reset Protocol, where many of those same patterns show up again in a different form when people begin to question the direction of their lives more broadly.
So if you decide to go back and explore the original NovelistSeeksHeroine.com site, it helps to approach it with the right expectations. You are not going to find something that looks polished or modern, and you are not going to find something that has been cleaned up to match current design standards. What you will find instead is a living archive of conversations, ideas, questions, and responses that unfolded in real time, before there was any sense of what they might eventually become.
If you spend a little time there, what begins to emerge is not just a set of pages, but a pattern. It is the pattern of how people search, how they choose, how they hesitate, how they repeat, and how, occasionally, they see something clearly enough to change direction in a way that alters everything that follows.
That is where Efficient Love comes from, and it is why it does not read like theory. It comes from something much harder to manufacture: sustained exposure to reality at a scale and intensity that leaves very little room for illusion.
And once you begin to recognize those patterns for yourself, it becomes very difficult to go back to not seeing them.
[If you’reinterested in visiting the real Novelist Seeks Heroine website, you can find the required login credentials when you join the ARC Team for Efficient Love.]
Thanks,
Robert
PS: If you are a corporate buyer, HR leader, coach, or program director interested in bulk purchase or organizational use, contact: SSFYLT@FiveYearLife.com