Introducing: Rebecca’s Love Equation

September 23, 2023

It’s a tale as old as time. Girl meets boy. Girl goes on dates with boy. Girl cooks dinner for boy. Girl catches feelings for boy. Boy starts being distant.

Girl fires off text after being mostly ignored for a few weeks: “Can I see you this weekend?“

Boy: “I’m out of town. Sry. Long days of training.“

Girl: “Oh okay! Well maybe I can see you when you get back? 😄”

Boy: *Reads text, does not reply.*

You may be shocked to learn that the role of “Girl” detailed above was played by me in our tale as old as time. You may also be shocked to hear that I sent that little 😄 without a trace of a smile on my face. And I certainly wasn’t smiling when I realized he wasn’t even going to reply to my last text. Read-receipts are truly monstrous. Seriously, they serve only nefarious purposes. I did not 😄.

That’s the thing I’ve noticed about my dating shenanigans of late. I haven’t been doing much smiling. I send a lot of 😄s, but don’t actually smile. Honestly, I’m not having much fun. As exciting as it is to regale you with my tales of the hilarity that ensues when a young woman sets out to find a soulmate in the big city (or any of the surrounding suburban or rural areas in Virginia or Maryland – I’M NOT PICKY AND I HAVE A NICE CAR FOR ROAD TRIPS), I’m not having as much fun as you might think. Yet I send out a 😄 to a man who is causing me a fair amount of pain, and he gets to think everything is fine and perhaps tell his buddies that the little data scientist he met at The Lost Fox in July is absolutely obsessed with him. Or much much more likely, he doesn’t tell them anything at all because he’s not thinking about me…ever.😄😄😄😄😄😢

I’ve been working at this whole dating thing pretty consistently since I was placed back on the clearance rack a couple of years ago, and all in all, it hasn’t been a good time. I’ve met some nice men and had some good times, but there’s also been a lot of SUCK. You’ve read about some of the suck here, although I have quite a few stories in my backlog that I’m saving for a rainy day. Remind me to tell you about the time I met a man at work who told me his wife was dead (spoiler alert: SHE WAS NOT DEAD). The conversation that I detailed above occurred earlier this week (is that even a conversation? Who knows.) and when I realized it was time to give up on this man, I was met with an all-too-familiar desire to give up on all of it. The whole dating scene. I went through the dramatic deletion of all of the dating apps – Bumble, Tinder, Hinge, gone, gone, gone – while an imaginary cinema soundtrack played “Everybody Hurts” by R.E.M. in the background in my head. I’ve deleted and re-downloaded these apps roughly 8 million times this year alone, expecting different results each time. And in true-Rebecca fashion, this time was no different. I already have Bumble safely back in my App Library (BUT, it’s not on my Home Screen, and that’s progress, dammit).

Something about this most recent round of insanity made me realize something, though. I think it’s time to try something different because this is no fun. I am not 😄-ing.

I was teaching a course on leadership at work a few weeks ago, and I was discussing how to handle the less-than-ideal situations you can encounter as a leader. I described the leadership process as a social one that sometimes looks like an experiment. The leader formulates a hypothesis, tries switching up some variables, and then examines the results. Rinse and repeat. The whole idea is that there are bad solutions and good solutions to all problems, but sometimes even the good solutions are not the right ones. The key is to keep trying to drive change with specific results in mind. As I’ve been thinking of the prickly nature of my love-life, I can’t help but think that the same principles could apply. I can try to make some changes to the way I approach dating with an end-goal of making it more fun. At the end of the day, dating probably is just a numbers game where you need to meet all of the wrong people before you meet the right one. But I think I can tweak the parameters of my approach to try to maximize the fun and quality of life I experience on the journey. I can make changes to minimize cynicism and preserve my overall good opinion of the men on this planet. Simply put, I want to 😄 more along the way, for real.

This reasoning is what led me to what I now present to you as Rebecca’s Love Equation. This is the name I am giving to my quest to treat the dating experience like the social experiment it is. I want to add more fun into the process, multiply my confidence and subtract the anxiety I’ve been feeling for so long. I want to use my data-driven, math-loving nature to treat my dating journey like a quest for data collection, and a series of exercises I can use to collect that data.

A side note about the name Rebecca’s Love Equation. My friend was trying to help me come up with a name for this endeavor, and she invoked ChatGPT. After a long back-and-forth with the chat bot, she eventually prompted it to come up with something punny, and the best suggestion by far was Love BECCAuse You Can. I feel like this is perfect, and I implore my friends named Rebecca who actually allow people to call them Becca to go on and snatch that title up.

Ok back to the Love Equation. My plan is to try to insert some variety, joy and game-like fun into my dating life. I have a few things in the works. My very-talented friend is helping me design a beautiful “business-card” that I can hand out “in the wild”. I’m shopping for a few statement items that I can wear or carry when I go out. Some ideas I’ve tossed out include: 1) A ball cap that says “I’m Single”. 2) A giant pink cocktail ring or other conversation-starting jewelry. 3) A football jersey or other sportz items I can use to talk to men at bars during Sunday football.

Most of this experiment is going to be less about what money can buy and more about the creativity I can insert into my dating endeavors. For example, last night I gave myself a little “challenge” before I went out. I challenged myself to go to a bar alone and read a book while enjoying my margarita. As it was my first Love Equation challenge, I wanted to keep it simple. Overall, I think the outing was a success. I dressed in my new maroon boot-cut jeans, and had my black jacket on that makes me feel like I’m on my way to a Bowling for Soup concert. I bellied up to the bar with my book and ordered a drink and some snacks, and spent about an hour alternating between reading, watching the football games on the tv’s and chatting with the people around me.

One man approached me to ask me, “How do you concentrate in here?!”, seemingly not noticing the irony of him interrupting me to ask about my concentration. But I welcomed the question and we had a nice chat about the books we are currently reading. He was there with his wife who told me she also loves Emily Henry novels when she came back from the restroom. I met a pair of women who were delightful. One of them was being hit on pretty heavily by a good-looking man, and I kept her friend, Beth entertained while they chatted. Beth asked me what book I was reading, and she doubled over laughing when I told her the truth: “Madame Restell, a biography about a woman who provided illegal abortions in her home in the 1800s.” She shouted, “OH a little light reading for your Friday night?! Smart, that way if the wrong man starts bugging you, you can scare him away by talking about your book!” Exactly.

I accomplished my small challenge, and walked away without having met my future husband but also ended my evening feeling good about myself. I felt like I had done something that was a little bit brave and a little bit different from my normal routine, and I didn’t sit at home alone feeling sorry for myself. I made eye contact with a handsome man in a black shirt and smiled at him. Even though he didn’t come over to talk to me, I still did that and he smiled back. That’s something – maybe my confidence was multiplied by a positive number greater than 1.

I think if I can insert some of these challenges into my life, this could be the type of variable-tweaking that could add more joy and confidence into my Love Equation. Here, dear reader, is where I’m going to ask you for your help. Nothing says “Social Experiment” more than crowd sourcing ideas from the masses. I want to ask you guys to do me a solid and send me some love challenges you think I should tackle. These challenges could be new activities you think I should try (e.g., golf, pickle ball, axe throwing, pottery class) or places I should visit (e.g., biergartens, corn mazes, amusement parks), or things I can do in normal places (like bars and restaurants) to spice things up (e.g., go by yourself and read a book, take a selfie wearing a man’s ball cap, collect three phone numbers by the end of the night). I trust you, dear reader, not to challenge me to things that will get me arrested or put me in danger. The only other stipulation I would add is that the challenges will ideally be things I can accomplish in the tri-county area near my home (that is, don’t challenge me to give my number out to ten men at the Grand Canyon) and they will be things I can accomplish in a single day or evening (that is, don’t challenge me to a 3 day hike). Beyond those stipulations, be creative.

I hope to get enough ideas from you to create a list that I can work off of as I have the time and energy. I’ll write about my experiences as I go, collect some data and hopefully begin to inch toward my goal of maximizing the joy of dating.

If you want to provide suggestions for challenges, recommend conversation-starting apparel or jewelry, refer me to nice single men that you know in the DMV area, or offer any other commentary on Rebecca’s Love Equation, you can send an email to our official inbox at RebeccasLoveEquation@gmail.com. If you prefer to submit an anonymous response, you can use this survey link or the QR code below.

Thanks in advance for your dedication to helping me solve Rebecca’s Love Equation.