Newswise — Is it possible to know you are about to marry a jerk before the wedding vows are spoken?" Marriage and family researcher John Van Epp says the answer is "yes." Van Epp, who has been married for 23 years and has two children, says that people can avoid marrying jerks by being better educated about positive behaviors, negative traits, and what to look for before getting too close to a potential spouse. Van Epp's "How to Avoid Marrying a Jerk" will be the focus of the Lipscomb University Family Wellness Conference April 12. Van Epp will speak from 6-8 p.m. in Willard Collins Alumni Auditorium, 3901 Granny White Pike, Nashville, Tenn. The conference is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
"The evening will be fun and people will learn ways to develop and sustain healthy relationships," said John Conger, associate professor and chair of the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences at Lipscomb University.
Van Epp is in his 15th year of counseling in a private practice, and periodically teaches as an adjunct professor of advanced marriage and family courses in the graduate counseling program at Ashland (Ohio) Theological Seminary. His video series, "How to Avoid Marrying a Jerk," is being taught in 45 states, seven nations, 250 military bases, and thousands of churches and other organizations, according to his website, "nojerks.com."
The Family Wellness Conference will begin at 1 p.m. April 12 with sessions focused on policymaking in regard to healthy marriages, Conger said.
Featured will be representatives from the Vanderbilt University Institute for Public Policy, the Metro Nashville Police Department, the Metro Schools Family Resource Centers, the mayor's office, and several churches.
Local research into the effect of marriage on various aspects of community life will be presented, and facts about the benefits of marriage and suggestions for ways to change policies to improve marriage education will be discussed, Conger said.
"People attending the day program will learn a lot about the importance of marriage to the community," Conger said.
The Family Wellness Conference is a project planned each year by senior family relations students. Because marriage is such a prominent issue at present, the students decided to focus this year's conference on achieving healthy marriages, Conger said.
"But what really got us interested in this subject is that there is mounting evidence that marriage is beneficial to society," he said.
"In social sciences we tend to look at big numbers and find the average," Conger said. "Of thousands and thousands of cases studied, the results show that on average, children who come from unmarried families do not do as well in school.
"When we look at reading scores, graduation scores, drop-out rates, and graduation from college rates, we find that children from unmarried families do not progress as fast or as far as children from married families," Conger said.
The studies also show that the average child from an unmarried family is more likely to get involved with criminal activity, to go to juvenile courts and to be involved in drug and alcohol abuse, he said.
"Marriage is a big deal in our society," Conger said.
In January, President George Bush proposed a $1.5 billion appropriation for healthy marriage education, an initiative to get communities involved in strengthening marriages in their own communities. For people who choose to be married, the initiative seeks to provide resources needed to educate them on ways to have a healthy marriage.
The Family and Consumer Sciences department at Lipscomb University has become involved with developing a healthy marriage initiative in Davidson County, Tenn.
"My main goal for the initiative is to form a coalition of individuals, agencies, and organizations including businesses, schools, and faith based groups such as churches that will work together to raise the awareness of the importance of marriage for communities and individuals and to work together to educate people in how to have long-lasting, satisfying marriages," Conger said.
Since last October, the Family and Consumer Sciences department and other "marriage-minded individuals" including the faith community, business community, mayor's office and other constituencies have been meeting to develop a healthy marriages initiative for the Nashville-Davidson County area, patterned after the Orange County, Calif., model, Conger said.
Davidson County is one of many across the United States that are working on healthy marriage initiatives, he said.
The Davidson County initiative has researched the correlation of marriage and health, education, crime, and general well being.
"We have gotten a lot of cooperation from groups in Nashville. We are going to report on our findings during the day sessions at the Family Wellness Conference," Conger said.
Register at http://fcs.lipscomb.edu.
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