In 1963 I graduated with a PhD from Stanford University. My advisor, Leon Festinger, casually opined that he could get me a job anywhere I liked. “Choose,” he said. I chose Harvard, Yale, or Bell Labs. (This was the post-Sputnik era, when jobs were so plentiful that it was a seller's market). Leon was supremely egalitarian, but the academic world was not. After a fistful of rejections – almost all saying that a woman wouldn't fit in at their premiere university – Leon began to fret. Then (as my aspirations declined) came similar rejections from junior colleges, and finally from all-boys’ prep schools. Leon just about gave up on finding me an academic job. Finally, in desperation, he called his long-time friend, Dean E. G. Williamson, at the University of Minnesota, who offered me a job at the Student Activities Bureau. It would be my task to arrange activities for incoming freshmen. Happily, and with some luck, I soon found my way to the Laboratory for Research in Social Relations, which in its short history had housed such luminaries as Leon, Stanley Schachter, Harold Kelley, Gardner Lindsey, Elliot Aronson, Ellen Berscheid (who was then a graduate student), and the like. I was accepted as a sort of an honorary sidekick.

I have always been intrigued by passion (what graduate student is not?) but in the early 1960s, passionate love and sexual desire were considered topics too silly, too trivial, too evanescent, and too mysterious to warrant investigation. But, as an organizer of University of Minnesota's Orientation activities, I was free to investigate anything I wanted. And what I wanted to do was to discover the underpinnings of romantic love and sexual desire – specifically the influence (if any) of market conditions on what young people yearn for, what they expect, and what they eventually settle for in a mate. Thus, in 1963, my friends and I designed the Computer Dance study – one of the first studies to investigate love, sexual desire, and mate selection, and certainly one of the first to match couples up with computers.