Singles going steady

To avoid marrying a jerk, singles educators say you should stay out of bed on the first date and cross-examine your partner. Critics say their advice is hokum.

By Sarah Elizabeth Richards

Read more: Life

Illustration by Mignon Khargie / Salon.com

March 7, 2006 | For Phil Majuk, all the signs were there: His apartment seemed so empty. He'd grown tired of hanging out with the guys every weekend. He longed for a female skiing and scuba diving companion.

And so it was that last February, for the first time in his life, Majuk, a 40-year-old electrician from Queens, N.Y., found himself itching to get hitched. He'd been dating a cute ministry student for a month and he didn't want to mess up a good thing. So he registered for John Van Epp's daylong dating skills seminar How to Avoid Marrying a Jerk, which teaches single people and those currently dating how to bond with partners and avoid wasting time with, well, jerks. There, he learned about Van Epp's "Relationship Attachment Model," which cautions daters to beware of the false intimacy of insta-relationships and encourages them to really get to know their new companions before they trust them, commit to them or sleep with them.

Majuk had only been seeing his new girlfriend for a few hours a couple of times a week, but after the seminar he worried that they were moving too fast. Following the tips he picked up from Van Epp, he told her that he thought they should do a lot more conversing and a lot less cuddling, and was relieved when she agreed. Twelve months later -- and with a longer version of Van Epp's course under his belt (this one was given over five Sundays at a Queens church) -- Majuk, now 41, says they are "on track" for marriage.

"It's been a helpful tool," Majuk says of Van Epp's courses. "I wanted to make sure I was [dating] the right way. The whole reason of courting is to find out if that person is the right one for you. I don't want to get divorced."

Van Epp's sassy-sounding seminar is just one in a fast-growing field of classes dedicated to teaching singles how to approach love -- and get two steps closer to the altar. An offshoot of the exploding marital education industry -- whereby couples take easy-to-digest courses about relationship skills, often taught by people without degrees in counseling or psychology -- dating workshops also attempt to train couples how to have successful relationships, long before they're ready to register at Pottery Barn. And because there are more singles now than at any other time in U.S. history -- census figures estimate that 44 percent of adult Americans are currently flying solo, compared to about one-third in 1960 -- singles educators have found a large and lucrative market to exploit.

Though on the surface singles educators seem to have a similar goal -- to create stronger partnerships -- those who champion it are a diverse bunch. Entrepreneurs, social scientists hoping to lower the divorce rate, religious organizations pushing abstinence agendas, and pro-marriage conservatives hoping to get single mothers wedded and off welfare are all developing or promoting singles programs. The U.S. Army plans to offer dating education as an elective to some 10,000 single soldiers this year. Domestic violence shelters and public high school districts are buying into the concept. Several states have programs that give couples a discount on their marriage licenses if they can show they've taken such a class. And last month, Congress passed the Bush administration's Healthy Marriage Initiative, which earmarks $100 million annually for private organizations -- many of them religious -- to offer marriage education classes to help prevent "at-risk" singles and couples from ending up on welfare rolls. Supporters argue that marriage will help strengthen families and prevent child poverty, emotional and behavioral problems, drug and alcohol abuse, and crime.

But critics charge that these programs, which were created using research with middle-class couples, aren't easily translatable to lower-income populations, who may be dealing with substance abuse or domestic violence problems. The one-size-fits-all nature of these courses may ultimately be the biggest drawback of relationship education, as well as the programs' focus on marriage as the goal for every couple, says Stephanie Coontz, a historian at the Evergreen State College and author of "Marriage, a History." "There are a lot of people clamoring to tell us they know how do marriage better," Coontz says. But along with that comes "a lot of wishful thinking."

There's also the question of whether lectures and workbook exercises can really help make sense of the least rational human emotion -- romantic love. But that's just what singles programs are trying to do. However, the seminars don't just recycle the old saws about cultivating common interests or encouraging clients such as Majuk's time with the guys. They explore why we're attracted to certain partners and analyze relationship mechanics, dynamics and deal-breakers.

For example, Van Epp's program, which also goes by the title Pre-Marital Interpersonal Choices and Knowledge (PICK), encourages daters to examine the "delusion of disassociative development" and investigate their love interests' family background and their exes. "When a single person is entering a relationship, they need a plan of what they're doing," explains Van Epp, 47, who says he has taught thousands of workshops over the past nine years and certified more than 500 instructors to teach his workbook and DVD. (McGraw-Hill just acquired his first book, which will be sold under the "Jerk" name and is expected in October.) "I want singles to feel they have the ability to manage their relationships and predict how the people [they are dating] will be down the road."

A former pastor and clinical counselor with a Ph.D. in psychology, Van Epp, who has been married for 26 years, says he developed his program from a growing body of research on relationship development and premarital predictors of marital success. Anyone who plunks down $350 for the instructional materials from his Web site, www.nojerks.com, and passes an online essay test, can hang out a shingle announcing him- or herself as a "relationship educator." Besides the military, churches are his best customers. Van Epp sells a Christian version of his program, which accounts for more than a quarter of his business and includes a workbook supplement that quotes scripture about abstaining from sex before marriage. (Although Van Epp teaches that it's emotionally risky to be intimate with someone before you really know them, he acknowledges that the realities of our "hook-up" culture prompted him to leave the question of "When can we do it?" unanswered in his secular workbook).

Next page: Does he break plans with friends? Does she snap at her dad? You could be next, warns one instructor