Finding Your Heart’s Desire Using the Love Calculator Workshop

The Love Calculator is a tool that helps single people get really really clear about the characteristics they want in a long-term partner, and then helps them evaluate candidates against those criteria.

(The Love Calculator Toolkit is a product developed by Karen Tiede at Red Tuxedo.  Support for the product has been moved to the Love Calculator Toolkit website.)

The workshop, Finding Your Heart’s Desire Using the Love Calculator, grew out of a meeting between Leslie Flowers and Karen Tiede in 2011. The workshop blends current understanding of happiness research (positive psychology), goal setting, and the challenges adults face using today’s dating habits, including online dating sites, together with a tool that can help it all make sense.

The tool itself has been used by designer Karen Tiede and her friends over the past 15 years. (Technology historians may note that is about as long mainstream culture has had access to MS Excel.)

The workshop explores:

• Mind models and why we keep dating the same person
• How we can step outside of dating the “next available” single person and identify what we really want in a love partner
• How to create the core content for an online dating site profile
• How to guide yourself through successful first dates that help you select an ideal love and life partner, without wasting time with people who can’t meet your needs.

We work with an understanding of how your mind works to create a list of characteristics and criteria you want in a partner, with no right or wrong answers. Then, we provide a way for you to remember and review your criteria through the initial first few dates with someone you meet, whether through an online service, chance encounter, or being set up by friends.

Being able to evaluate potential love partners against a clearly defined list of relevant criteria is one of the easiest and best solutions to the problem of “next available,” or “better than the last one,” or “the exact opposite of the last one.”

The workshop lasts about 90 minutes. Participants will receive their own copy of the Love Calculator toolkit, as well as paper copies of the relevant worksheets so they can get started during the class. Some people may finish a complete list of criteria during the workshop, but others will find they need more reflective time to complete their thinking.

If more time is available, the workshop can be extended to include creating a profile for an online dating service, using the material identified in the criteria-setting section.

To schedule a workshop for your group, contact presenters Karen Tiede or Leslie Flowers.

Workshop Presenters

Karen Tiede has more than 20 years experience designing systems that streamline repeated tasks. She developed the Finding Your Heart’s Desire Using the Love Calculator process to work through 34 first dates in six months that led to a successful relationship.

Leslie Flowers has spent the last 15 years guiding people to extraordinary results by clearly articulating how the mind works and particularly, why we get the results we do and how to make lasting changes. She has used this work to achieve remarkable success in her own life.

Who  Benefits from the Finding Your Heart’s Desire Workshop?

People who have taken the workshop and found it helpful include:

• Newly single men and women entering the dating scene again, who may not have used online services the last time they dated
• Singles who recognize they may have dated a number of different people, who turned out to be different versions of essentially the same person, and it’s not working
• Traditionally, people with a technical bent have taken to the tool a bit faster, and may not need the workshop.  However, even people with romantic perspectives agree that working through 200 candidate profiles in a dating service can be overwhelming, and maybe technology could help with that part of finding romance.

Dating Tips

1. Talk to a real person in your real life about what you’re doing and who you’re meeting.
2. Make it easy to end a date. Weekday lunches and after work; Sat-Sun daytime. Friday & Saturday night dates are more difficult to end.
3. Never have two meals on the first date.
4. Solve for your show stoppers fast.
5. Meet in public.
6. Let a real person know where you’re going and when you expect to be back. (Print your date’s profile and leave it on the refrigerator.)
7. Get a good picture. Have a friend take at least 100 and pick the best. (Look at Look Better Online.)
8. The next day, ask your gut / soul / unconscious / subconscious / higher self / God of your understanding: Yes or No?
9. A quick No may be uncomfortable, but a bad relationship is always worse.
10. Keep your shoes on.

Reading List

Suggestions about books we’ve found to provide interesting perspectives on dating.  We strongly recommend the last two, especially for single women with children.

• He’s Just Not that Into You, Greg Behrendt & Liz Tuccillo
• The Rules & The Rules II, Ellen Fein & Sherrie Schneider
• A Round Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance, Jane Juska (subtitle: Before I turn 67—next March—I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me. NY Review of Books)
• Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, John Gray
• 10-10-10, Suzy Welch. A strategy for making decisions: how will this work out in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years?
• The Gift of Fear: Survivial signals that protect us from violence, Gavin de Becker (for adults)
• Protecting the Gift: Keeping children and teenagers safe, and parents sane, Gavin de Becker (about recognizing when your children are at risk from other people)