Follow me on Twitter and keep up with this live-blog for comments from the Rethinking Sex conference:

Funny introduction from the first speaker at the conference:

• “Jerk” has no gender. To illustrate, Van Epp showed a clip from Jerry Maguire to show the unchangeability of a jerk. He asks, “Love can motivate you but is love going to fix you?”
• After Van Epp announced that he’s been married for 30 years, the entire audience clapped. “But she died 25 years ago … just kidding!”
• Van Epp on meeting his wife: “I was obsessed. I would just watch her. For like six weeks.”

Why is love blind?

• Van Epp says it’s because of “head knowledge” and “heart knowledge”
• According to him, the head and the heart should work together.

First theoretical construct: Partner Selection (Character Development)

• For most of history, arranged marriages were commonplace. Families had economic interests in mind.
• Dating didn’t exist a century ago. The term “dating” was first used in the 40s.
• “When you marry someone, you’re not just marrying an individual. You’re marrying their family.”
• Individualized decision-making, without family guidance or principles. Van Epp: “Now the basic taboo we have is that there are no taboos.” Hmm … not sure I agree. As far as I know, being a jerk is still a taboo!
• Van Epp just said mockingly, “This is no place for morals or convictions.” As someone who eschews sexual stigmas, I don’t agree. Sex radicals (whatever you want to call them) may not conform to the idea of marriage as an end goal or to virginity as a virtue but that doesn’t mean a complete dismissal of ethics. Who says we can’t have morals re: how we treat each other in bed? I’m pretty sure people continue to judge others for behaving irresponsibly in sexual situations.
• “I think the good-hearted person are the most at risk. If someone does something wrong in a relationship, what do you do?” Audience answer: “Forgive them.” Um … no. That’s not being good-hearted; that’s being delusional.
• “We need to give people a grid for partner assessment.”

Second theoretical construct: Relationship Development (R.A.M.)

• Relationship Attachment Model, which you can read more about here. Discusses how you pace a relationship, are there healthy and unhealthy ways to have or develop a relationship?
• Five sources of love/closeness: know, trust, rely, commit, touch.
• The level of each relationship link should not exceed the level of the previous. (That is, you should not  touch more than you can commit more than you can rely more than you can trust more than you can know.)
• “One of the most common ways people are set up to get involved with a jerk is by accelerating the pace of a relationship.” Epp blames this for date rape. He suggests a 90-day probation period.
• Van Epp notes that people are pushing marriage back further and want to marry at a later age than ever before in the past. There may be a smaller pool of prospective partners.
• Van Epp says people don’t necessarily learn from their relationship mistakes. “Been there done that does not always make you do it differently or give you better odds.”
• Oh god. Van Epp just brought up Lori Gottlieb’s “Marry Him”.
• Van Epp says when you’re single, you may “engage in more relationship activities known to heighten risks in marriage.” Now he’s citing stats demonstrating that the number of sexual partners is the strongest predictor of future divorce. Which doesn’t strike me as necessarily a bad thing. Maybe those who have had more sexual/romantic experiences are more aware of what kind of relationship they want and what kind of relationship doesn’t satisfy them.
• According to one study, the more premarital partners a man has, the more likely he is to engage in extramarital affairs.
• He says that we have the mentality that “Until we get married, we live in Vegas. This is very misleading. When we look at research, there is a pervasive myth that relationships have no continuity. Research has shown that if someone has drug abuse, once they’re married, they will probably have continued drug use. Patterns that have occured in my single years will program my future patterns. This is just the reality of life.”

On dating around and the “hook-up” culture:

• The entire concept of the hook-up is that “touch” has nothing to do with know/trust/rely/commit (the Relationship Attachment Model, see above). Van Epp says, “We don’t have any evidence of that in the sciences. We know from biological studies that the brain operates. You can’t just get involved and have the brain not produce chemicals. When you go into a hook-up, you take all of you, not just a part of you. Just bouncing around in hook-up relationships can be just as detrimental and getting into a relationship right away.”

• Again, I don’t agree. Just because the brain produces chemicals does not mean that hooking up is detrimental. There are a lot of non-sexual activities, like hugging or stroking someone’s back, that produce similar chemicals. You can’t say that just because there is some sort of reaction that there is justification for not hooking up.

• Apparently, a woman once had sex with Jeffrey Dahmer without knowing it was him because she met him in a bar and had a one-night stand. Clearly, this means that no one should ever have casual sex.

John Van Epp, PhD, President/Founder of loveThinks, LCC (www.nojerks.com), is the author of How to Avoid Falling in Love with a Jerk, published by McGraw-Hill, which blends in-depth research with humorous stories to provide a map for making healthy relationship choices. His twenty-five years of clinical experience and extensive research in premarital, marital and family relations have paved the way for his programs to be taught in thousands of churches, singles organizations, educational settings and social agencies in all fifty states, ten countries and by more than 2,500 military personnel. His book and relationship courses have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Psychology Today, O Magazine, and Cosmopolitan; and he has appeared on the CBS Early Show, the O’Reilly Factor, Fox News, and Focus on the Family. He has been happily married for over thirty years and is the proud father of two daughters.