Singles going steady

Nadine Dixon, 25, who took the class at New Life, although she wasn't currently in a relationship, found Van Epp's relationship checklist quite helpful. "I have an urge to write a list of 50 questions that I'll ask on the first date," gushed the administrative assistant from Queens. "I want to know right away [if someone is right for me]."

Dixon thought Van Epp's approach was useful in examining her own dating preparedness. "It's something you can turn inward. How does my family background affect me? How do I resolve conflict? What do I need to work on? Do I have what I'm looking for?

"It is overwhelming," she admitted. "I'm like, 'Whoa! I'm not ready. I'm a jerkette. This is showing me that. I wish I would have learned this stuff in college."

Several programs actually hope to do one better -- by teaching "this stuff" to a segment of the population notoriously bad at romance: high school students. More than 200 school districts have purchased the Love U2 series, a 40-lesson course on relationship and communication skills put out by the nonpartisan, non-religious Dibble Fund based in Berkeley, Calif.

"We have sex ed for kids but nothing on relationships," says curricula writer Marline Pearson, a social science instructor at Madison Area Technical College in Wisconsin. "We only talk to students about sex in a health context. What about relationships and emotions?" (Love U2 advocates sexual abstinence -- a factor that Pearson says is motivated by her audience's age, not by any political statement.)

Pearson, who says she became inspired to write the program after she saw many of her female students struggling with abusive boyfriends, uses some principles from Van Epp's program and PREP and makes them more accessible to teenagers. But isn't there value in early romantic failures -- the unrequited crushes, the three-day "relationships," the Depeche Mode song lyrics scribbled on notebooks?

"We're not trying to make them calculated, sophisticated dating machines," says Pearson. "I just want to plant a few solid ideas ... about what a healthy relationship looks like. Does it feel controlling or supportive and nurturing? Does it feel conditional or unconditional? Does it feel mostly about sex or material things? It works as well for 15-year-olds as 40-year-olds." Researchers at Auburn University in Alabama recently launched a five-year study of more than 5,000 high school students to look at whether students who completed the Love U2 program made better romantic decisions, practiced good communication skills and experienced decreased verbal and physical aggression in their dating relationships. They plan to test them before and after the course, follow them for several years afterward and compare them with students who didn't take it.

The U.S. Army is also getting into the act of educating singles. According to an Army study released in July on the need for "preventative educational programs that teach healthy relationship skills," servicemen have higher rates of marriage and are more likely to divorce when compared to male civilians. (The Army's divorce rate in 2004 was 6 percent for officers and 3.5 percent for enlisted soldiers -- three times higher than in 2002 because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; it fell slightly in 2005.) The study also found that servicemen and -women enter into "marriages of systematically lower quality than would be acceptable in civilian life" -- partly lured by military marriage benefits, such as off-base housing allowances or additional money for food expenses.

"The Army has a vested interest in helping soldiers get into relationships that last," says Chaplain Peter Frederich, family ministries officer for the Army Chief of Chaplains based at the Pentagon. "Research shows that if they form strong romantic partnerships, they are better soldiers and stay in the Army longer."

Many bases currently teach domestic violence prevention seminars and marriage education classes, such as PREP, but the Army is eager to add dating skills classes and plans to broaden Van Epp's program to most bases by the end of the year for nearly 10,000 soldiers, according to Frederich. (Van Epp says he has a contract to train 200 chaplains at 10 bases in the U.S. and Europe to become certified instructors.) Several hundred soldiers at Fort Jackson in Columbia, S.C., and Fort Knox, Ky., have taken a modified version of the program already. It's unknown if soldiers actually changed their dating behavior after taking the course, but an Army report on Van Epp's program found that 98 percent of about 120 surveyed participants said they felt the content was helpful and planned to use it.

It appears likely that institutions like the Army will continue to look to the social sciences to shed light on the way we behave in relationships and learn how to make them better. But ultimately, love is a crap shoot, a leap of faith, a voyage into the unknown (insert metaphor here). It isn't emotionally safe or predictable or methodical. It can blow up in your face and rattle you to your core.

And, workbook or no workbook, that's a risk we can't seem to stop taking.

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