An Australian woman who applied her business skills to the dating game and set herself the goal of going on one date a week says she finally found love after more than two-and-a-half years and 138 dates.

43-year-old Rebekah Campbell hadn’t been on a date in ten years when she first set out on her journey in 2012.

Speaking to Tom Dunne on Moncrieff this afternoon, she said she lost her first love to a car accident in her 20s and “carried him with me for a very long time” afterwards.

When she woke up on Christmas morning in 2011 and realised she hadn’t been out with anyone for a decade she decided it was time to take action.

“I am really afraid of getting rejected and looking silly putting myself of the internet and that had held me back for a long time but I think at that point, waking up that Christmas morning, the fear of being alone for the rest of my life kind of overtook the fear of rejection and looking silly so I just decided OK, this is it, I’m just going to go for it,” she said.

She said she decided to treat the dating game like her business – spreadsheets and all – and set herself the clear target of one date a week.

“I thought OK, I have 52 shots at this across a year, I want to invest my time going out with guys who have the best chance of being a match for me,” she said.

“I needed a lot of potential candidates at the top so, I started just with E-Harmony and then I added Tinder and all of the other dating sites that are out in Australia as well as signing up for classes and got introductions.

“Then I also worked out, after going out on a couple of bad dates, that I could learn a lot about someone if I had a phone call with them so I would always do phones calls on a Sunday afternoon with kind of four or five people I talked to online during the week. If that felt good and there was potential, we would go on a date during the week."

Rebekah Campbell. Image: RebekahCampbell.com

Ms Campbell said the spreadsheets were handy when it came to keeping on top of who everyone was.

“I was doing so many of these calls, I would forget their stories so I would say, oh how is your sister in Adelaide and they would look at me funny and I’d think oh that was the other phone call.

“So, it wasn’t to tick off anything or something like that, it was really just to kind of manage the pipeline essentially.”

Throughout the process, she took most of her dates to one of two nearby venues.

“There were some funny discussions with the people who worked in the restaurant,” she said.

“One restaurant was a tapas restaurant and they had this script they did every time where they asked, have you dined with us before and then they would explain the menu.

“After a while they started looking at me going, I know you so I had to tell them, look I am doing this thing where I am dating every week so just do your whole script thing pretend you don’t know me.

“They just thought it was very funny. They were good sports about it.”

Rebekah Campbell and her family. Image: RebekahCampbell.com

She said it was only a she became comfortable with herself and who she was that she started to find success.

“There are a ton of little insights that are important but I think the overarching insight was that,” she said. “I was trying to become something different because I didn’t think I was enough.

“I didn’t think that just being me was likable enough essentially and so, through the process, I shed a lot of layers of insecurity really to become confident with myself and in the end, when I did meet the man of my dreams … when we had our first date, I really was completely comfortable in myself and I wasn’t thinking about what I looked like and I wasn’t running off the bathroom to fix my lipstick or anything like that.

“I was just in the moment and we had a deep conversation about his family and I asked him why he became a teacher and our values were aligned and I knew straightaway on that first night that this was the person I would spend the rest of my life with.

“But who I was on that date was very different to the person I was in the beginning and it was a real process. It wasn’t enough to just say you have got to be yourself, it was a process of a lot of things and getting things back to the point where I was like I am now. Just me.”

Rebekah said she and he now husband Rod Lane fell in love very quickly” and were expecting their first child within six months of meeting.

“Now have two beautiful young children who have just turned three and just turned five,” she said. “A boy and a girl so we are very happy.”

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