By Popular Demand

Chapter 1: The Exit Interview

The thing about getting dumped on a Tuesday is that you still have to go to work on Wednesday.

Millie Dutton sat in her office at the University of Chicago's Department of Behavioral Economics, staring at a half-eaten KIND bar and a text message from Greg that read: "I think you're an incredible person, but dating you is like being cross-examined by a very attractive attorney who also has pie charts."

She read it three times. Then she opened her laptop and added Greg to a spreadsheet she'd titled, with characteristic precision, "Relationship Post-Mortems."

Greg Hennessy. Duration: 4.5 months. Stated reason for termination: "Emotionally analytical." Secondary factor: "Exhausting to argue with." Tertiary factor: Probable. See previous entries.

The previous entries were not encouraging.

Entry one: David Polowski, high school music teacher, seven months. He'd told her she made him feel like a research subject. Which was unfair, because she'd only tracked his mood patterns in a notebook twice, and one of those times was for a work project. Mostly.

Entry two: Jordan McBride, sous chef, five months. Jordan had actually been the most articulate about it. Over a plate of his admittedly excellent risotto, he'd said, "Millie, I love that you're brilliant. But sometimes I want to have a fight about who forgot to buy milk without you explaining the sunk cost fallacy."

She'd told him that wasn't even the right application of the sunk cost fallacy.

He'd moved out the next morning.

And now Greg. Greg, who collected vinyl records and laughed at her jokes and once drove forty-five minutes to bring her soup when she had a cold. Greg, who'd lasted four and a half months before sending a breakup text that included the word "pie charts" as a legitimate grievance.

Millie closed the spreadsheet and looked around her office. The walls were covered in behavioral economics posters she'd designed herself for a departmental open house two years ago. One showed a cartoon brain saying, "I know this is irrational, but I'm going to do it anyway." Another featured a flowchart titled "Why You Just Bought Something You Don't Need." A third, her personal favorite, displayed the words "HOMO ECONOMICUS IS A LIE" in bold red letters above a photo of someone eating cake for breakfast.

Her entire career was built on understanding why people make terrible decisions. She'd published papers on it. She'd given a TEDx talk titled "Your Brain Is Lying to You (And Here's the Receipt)." She consulted for companies that wanted to understand why consumers would pay fourteen dollars for a smoothie but refuse to spend three dollars on a retirement fund contribution.

And yet she could not, for the life of her, figure out why she kept failing at the most basic human interaction known to civilization.

Her phone buzzed. It was her older sister, Pauline.

"Heard about Greg. You okay?"

Millie typed back: "Fine. Relationship had a negative expected value anyway."

Three dots appeared, disappeared, appeared again.

"This is exactly what Greg was talking about, isn't it."

Millie put her phone facedown on the desk.

She pulled up her most recent research paper, a study on how framing effects influence consumer choices in healthcare plans. The data was clean. The methodology was sound. The conclusions were logical and replicable. This was what she was good at. This was where the world made sense.

But as she scrolled through the paper, a thought began to form — the kind of thought that arrives quietly and then refuses to leave, like a houseguest who's found the good towels.

She studied decision-making for a living. She designed experiments. She recruited participants, gathered data, identified patterns. She was, objectively, one of the best people in the city at figuring out why humans do stupid things.

So why was she trying to solve her love life alone?

The thought crystallized, and Millie sat up straighter.

What if she didn't try to solve it alone? What if she applied actual methodology? Not the half-hearted spreadsheet tracking she'd been doing — real methodology. Controlled conditions. Diverse perspectives. A proper sample of human opinions to counteract her own obvious biases.

What if she recruited a focus group?

She grabbed a legal pad from her desk drawer and started writing.

---

By Thursday afternoon, Millie had a research design.

Not a formal one — she wasn't going to submit this to the IRB, obviously. This was personal. But she'd spent enough years designing studies that the framework came naturally.

Objective: Identify and correct systematic errors in romantic decision-making through structured external feedback.

Method: Recruit 6-8 participants of varying ages, genders, and backgrounds to serve as a consultative panel. The panel would evaluate romantic prospects, advise on behavioral strategies, and provide real-time feedback on dating decisions.

Compensation: $50 Visa gift cards per session, plus snacks.

Millie posted the recruitment notice on three community boards, two Reddit threads, and the bulletin board at the coffee shop on Dearborn Street where she bought her morning latte. The notice read:

"SEEKING PARTICIPANTS FOR ONGOING FOCUS GROUP. Topic: Romantic decision-making and partner evaluation. No experience necessary. All perspectives welcome. Compensation provided. Serious inquiries only."

She deliberately kept it vague. In her experience, the best focus group participants were the ones who showed up curious rather than agenda-driven.

Within forty-eight hours, she had twenty-three responses. She screened them by phone, looking for diversity of perspective and, frankly, people who sounded like they could sit in a room for two hours without being unbearable.

She selected eight.

There was Maeve Greenaway, seventy years old, a retired high school English teacher from Bridgeport who'd been married to the same man for forty-four years before he passed. "I've forgotten more about love than most people ever learn," she'd said on the phone, and Millie had written "KEEP" in capital letters on her screening form.

There was Doug Feinstein, fifty-one, a divorced plumber from Wicker Park who described his love life as "a series of plumbing emergencies, metaphorically speaking." He had a deep, gravelly voice and laughed at everything, including things that weren't funny.

There was Yolanda Baptiste, twenty-six, a graduate student in sociology who was writing her thesis on modern dating culture and saw the focus group as "ethnographic fieldwork, but fun." She used the word "heteronormative" twice in a three-minute phone call, which Millie found both impressive and slightly exhausting.

There was Chester "Chet" Nowicki, forty-three, an insurance adjuster who'd recently been left by his wife for her Pilates instructor. He was, by his own admission, "working through some stuff."

There was Priya Subramaniam, thirty-eight, a real estate agent and mother of two who said she joined because her own marriage was "great, but boring, and I need to live vicariously through someone."

There was Rasheed Owens, twenty-two, a barista and aspiring comedian who told Millie he was "basically a professional observer of human stupidity" and could "definitely help."

There was Bev Kowalczyk, sixty-one, a semi-retired florist who'd been married three times and described herself as "an expert in beginnings."

And there was supposed to be a guy named Keith, a forty-year-old accountant, but Keith emailed the morning of the first session to say he'd gotten back together with his ex and no longer needed "romantic guidance from strangers," which Millie thought was ironic on several levels.

So she had seven. Seven was fine. Seven was a perfectly acceptable focus group size. She'd make it work.

She booked a conference room at the public library on State Street, set out a tray of cookies from the bakery down the block, stacked the gift cards neatly by the door, and waited.

This was either going to be the smartest thing she'd ever done or a catastrophic waste of Visa gift cards.

She was genuinely unsure which.