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

Crisis In Marriage And Family

• Over last four decades: increases in divorce, separation, non-marriage, cohabitation, out-of-wedlock births, single-parent households, and domestic violence & decreases in marital quality, father involvement, family extendedness
• “Some mistakenly think that we suggest single parents do not or cannot do a good job raising their children. The point here is simply that the research shows marriage matters and healthy marriages matter even more. If you look at the population at a whole, those who are not married — and their children — are at greater risk overall.” Malone-Colon cites her own granddaughter, raised by her son, as an example of a child in a healthy single-parent home.

Consequences Of The Weakening Of Marital Relationships

• According to Malone-Colon’s work at the Institute for American Values, married couples are better off physically, psychologically, socially, and economically than co-habitating couples.
• My question: is there something inherent in the act of “getting married” that creates these effects, or is getting married an indication that a couple is better off to begin with?
• African Americans are disproportionately affected when they do not marry. High rates of out-of-wedlock births and single-parent households. As Katie from the Harvard Dems points out, this is undeniably a consequence of high incarceration rates of black men (which is probably due to socioeconomics). In other words, it’s not lack of marriage itself that causes problems, but the various structural factors working against blacks in America.

Hooking Up vs. Hooking In

• Hooking up: a physical or sexual encounter that does not necessarily imply any ongoing commitment or future relationship between the two participants
• Hooking in: going within and reflecting on what one hopes their most intimate relationship will satisfy emotionally and perhaps spiritually within them
• Friendship: enjoyment, acceptance, trust, respect, interests, support, confidence, shared power
• Malone-Colon asks if hooking up prepares you for future relationships or sets up a pattern of emotionally detached relationship. She says hooking up disallows connections that are intellectual, emotional, and spiritual.

How True Friendship & Intimacy Is Essential To Creating Loving And Lasting Relationships

• Malone-Colon claims there is no inclination or time to develop these friendship qualities when hooking up. From my personal experience, I know that this isn’t true — and that further, hooking up does not just happen with strangers.
• She encourages people to realize intimacy and friendship through self-awareness, integrity, self-respect, values, personal fortitude, social responsibility. I think all of these qualities can be realized in a hook-up relationship and wouldn’t settle for anything less if I sought a fuck buddy.
• Suggestions: Communication and conflict resolution skills. Practice self-respect. Being aware of and honoring your own desires. Structured environments to share relationship fears and dreams.
• A couple gender/hetero-normative comments: Malone-Colon says that men benefit from accepting notions of manhood such as responsibility and should reject notions such as prestige. In her class, her female students “honor” the male students, and vice versa. Each group says what they “love” about the other. She says that everyone gets to be acknowledged for special qualities. But the way this exercise is explained, it seems like people are being praised for gender-normative attributes. What about those who don’t conform to or identify with typically feminine/masculine behavior?
• Audience members asked about how to change the dominant culture: “There’s a tendency of the media to change the conversation to same-sex marriage and not to the general trend in marriage.” Malone-Colon says that they should stay on message, continue to hold conferences like this one, and intentionally garner media attention.
• “It’s so political. We don’t want to make people who are divorced feel bad. We can’t point out that it makes a difference or it’ll make them feel bad. We want everyone to feel empowered. When you talk about marriage, then you have to talk about same-sex marriage.”

Dr. Malone-Colón is Chair of the Psychology Department at Hampton University, a Senior Fellow at the Institute for American Values and the former Executive Director of the National Healthy Marriage Resource Center (NHMRC).  She is also the founder and Executive Director of the new National Center for African American Marriages and Parenting at Hampton University.  The Center brings together Black Churches and Black Institutions of Higher Education to help strengthen the institutions of marriage and family in African American communities.

Dr. Malone-Colón is a noted scholar and national speaker, and consultant on African American marriages. Currently, she is conducting a ground-breaking study on “the Quality of African American Marriages”.  She also designed and teaches a premier course on Black marriages for college students that has been featured at the annual Smart Marriages Conferences and in Essence magazine.

Dr. Malone-Colón earned a Ph.D. degree in Personality Psychology with a minor in neuro-psychology, and a M.S. degree in Clinical Psychology at Howard University.

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.

I’m live-blogging from the Rethinking Sex conference at Harvard. Sponsored by the Love & Fidelity Network and True Love Revolution (the campus abstinence group), the conference was advertised with the following description:

“Do what feels right.”

“Just be yourself.”

These are the most common pieces of advice young adults receive when approaching relationships. Casual sexual relationships dominate the dating scene, break-ups and heartbreaks abound, marriages dissolve, and young adults struggle to know where to learn the skills needed to build healthy, stable relationships.

We recognize a great need among young men and women for practical education on how to build and sustain healthy, stable, and meaningful relationships.

“Rethinking Sex: Building Healthy Relationships in a Hook-up World” aims to inform and educate young adults about how to approach interpersonal relationships in a healthy and meaningful way, with an eye towards laying a foundation for strong marriages in the future.

The conference will feature an outstanding line-up of prestigious psychologists ready to share their expertise. The sessions will focus on what the psychological sciences and clinical research have to teach us about human intimacy, love, mate selection, and friendship and the relationship skills needed to find success in these areas.

I’ll be live-blogging this throughout the day. The opening remarks, made by TLR co-president Rachel Wagley, included a quote from Professor Leon Kass (University of Chicago):

“The very terms wooing, courting, suitors are archaic [and even TLR doesn’t use those words] but today, there are no socially prescribed forms of conduct . lack a cultural script for marriage. the privileged, college-educated - Today, there are no socially prescribed forms of conduct that help guide young men and women in the direction of matrimony…. People still get married — though later, less frequently, more hesitantly, and, by and large, less successfully. For the great majority, the way to the altar is uncharted territory: It’s every couple on its own bottom, without a compass, often without a goal. Those who reach the altar seem to have stumbled on it by accident.”

This comes from an essay that also includes the following:

“Once female modesty became a first casualty of the sexual revolution, even women eager for marriage lost their greatest power to hold and to discipline their prospective mates. For it is a woman’s refusal of sexual importunings, coupled with hints or promises of later gratification, that is generally a necessary condition of transforming a man’s lust into love. Women also lost the capacity to discover their own genuine longings and best interests. For only by holding herself in reserve does a woman gain the distance and self-command needed to discern what and whom she truly wants and to insist that the ardent suitor measure up. While there has always been sex without love, easy and early sexual satisfaction makes love and real intimacy less, not more, likely — for both men and women. Everyone’s prospects for marriage were — are — sacrificed on the altar of pleasure now.”

Courtship? Maybe it’s overrated.