Singles going steady

It's not clear how many singles workshops are being offered across the country, though Diane Sollee, a couples therapist who in 1996 founded Smart Marriages, a clearinghouse for marriage education information, says she knows of at least a half dozen relationship seminars that target daters, most of them offshoots of marriage education programs. For the past two decades, social scientists have been studying the behaviors that keep people married and in love, says Sollee. Now those findings have been translated into easily digestible skill sets that can be taught in 10-hour seminars. "People like learning rather than going to therapy," says Sollee. "To get counseling, you have to say something is wrong with you," she says, explaining that men stereotypically shy away from shrinks but tend to be more receptive to a seminar with conflict resolution tips. At the annual Smart Marriages conference last year, more than 2,000 people, mostly marriage educators and counselors from community and religious organizations, attended compared to 400 in the mid-1990s. "The idea that you can actually get smarter about marriage, that it doesn't have to be a 50-50 game of chance, is a huge paradigm shift that can change the whole singles experience," says Sollee. "Singles gain the confidence to marry."

It's too early to know if these courses actually help people stay happily married for the long haul; however, one of the most popular programs for couples, known as PREP (Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program), which was developed at the University of Denver in the early 1980s, claims that participants were a third less likely to break up after five years compared to others who didn't take it.

PREP aims to remedy the poor modeling many people witness growing up in divorced homes. "Adults enter marriage with less ability to communicate well and with a diminished sense of commitment and how it works in a marriage," explains Scott Stanley, co-founder of PREP, which offers versions for Christians, Jews, empty-nesters and low-income parents. (The state of Oklahoma, for example, used an adaptation of PREP for welfare recipients.) "That's where education comes in. The idea is, 'Maybe I can date better. Maybe I can be a better marriage partner,'" he says.

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One recent Sunday, Laura Speiller, a pastor at New Life Fellowship Church in Queens, explained some dating strategies to a small coed class. "You can be treated like a queen in a dating relationship," she cautioned. "But it can be different in marriage. He's putting his best foot forward in dating. You're only seeing one side of the person."

Speiller, who was trained by Van Epp to teach How to Avoid Marrying a Jerk, advised using the "detective technique" to examine a person's past and attempt to infer whether he or she would become a lovable lug or just a big jerk. Daters should observe their squeezes' behavior around other people: Does he break plans with friends? Does she snap at her dad? Does he roll his eyes at his mother? Does she boast about how she bit off the head of a co-worker? You could be next, warns Speiller.

Once you have gathered enough info, she said, you can make an informed decision about whether to take the plunge into marriage. That decision shouldn't be made, however, until you have asked your sweetie a total of 99 questions, including what their mothers were like as wives, how they react to authority figures, whether they're comfortable with nudity and what they argued about with their exes.

It was enough to make one wonder whether Van Epp's approach might not be, well, paranoid.

"You can be safe without being neurotic," Van Epp insists. "There are people who over-think everything. They have to back off and lighten up, but when they know what to consider and look out for, they don't have to back off blindly."

According to his program, the more you hold back emotionally while investigating someone, the easier it will be to cut him or her loose if red flags set off your jerk radar. "If your areas of bonding stay at the lower level, you can get out quicker. You're not so attached," he explains, as though love were like a hedge fund.

The problem is that for many people, by the time they actually care enough about someone's ability to apologize or handle guilt (more things Van Epp says to watch for), they're already smitten. How can one reverse the process? "It's a delicate balance," Van Epp concedes, pointing out that couples don't stop acting on their best behavior until at least three months into a relationship. (Or as Chris Rock puts it, "You're meeting their representative!") "You can control what you do with your heart. I fell madly in love with my wife the first night I met her. [But] how I pace the building of the relationship doesn't have to be with the same intensity. Even with chemistry, it requires time and self-restraint."

Van Epp, like most other relationship educators, doesn't think jumping in the sack on the first date is a good idea -- and isn't moved by the argument that having sex early on is a useful way to weed out people you aren't sexually compatible with.

"There's research that the first sexual experience changes the level of closeness in a relationship," he says. "Ultimately, if things don't work out, the emotional upset of the breakup is much greater because they were involved sexually."

The premise of Van Epp's program is seductive: that with careful screening and "relationship health inventories," you can regulate how much you love someone and protect yourself from pain and rejection. But can such meta-analyses and schemata guide the way we fall in love? And is there such a thing as doing it in an emotionally "safe" way, as Van Epp contends?

"[These programs] give people an illusion of easy answers," says Coontz. "Some [educators] are just old-fashioned entrepreneurs selling untested programs. Then there are others who've been studying marriage all their lives. They're offering useful advice, but you have to source that."

Then there's the question of timing. Due diligence can be a good idea in theory, but it may be overwhelming at the courtship stage. "There's a difference between a marital and dating relationship," explains Barry McCarthy, a sex and marital therapist and author, with his wife, Emily McCarthy, of "Getting It Right the First Time: Creating a Healthy Marriage." "Just like there's a different set of skills and attitudes that go into a permanent job vs. an internship. By the third month, talking about issues of your family of origin or money or career is a different conversation than with someone you've been dating for 15 months, whom you're planning to marry."

"To do some introspective work creates awareness of what you like -- that's a good thing," says relationship guru John Gray, of "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" fame. "But to necessarily make every date into a workshop is not for everyone."

Gray recommends a tried and true approach to figuring out whom to keep dating and whom to ditch: Go with your gut. (That's all you have to go on anyway since the part of your brain that makes intellectual decisions inconveniently shuts down when you're first in love.) "One morning you wake up and you feel, 'Wow, this is the person for me!' There's a knowing that's a sum total of experiences with this person. It's not a checklist," Gray says.

Next page: Isnt there some value in early romantic failures, in unrequited crushes and three-day "relationships"?