Posted on 02/13/2009 5:27:57 PM PST by Diana in Wisconsin
While falling in love can be as random as cupid's arrow, there is a science to staying in love.
So says Madison Area Technical College instructor Marline Pearson, who has melded her background in history, criminology and sociology together to become an unlikely love guru. She helps students navigate and control the thorny and mysterious realms of love, relationships, living together, sex, parenting and marriage.
To Pearson, the connection between her past work and relationship skills is clear.
"Here is a message I want you to take home," Pearson told her most recent MATC class. "Relationships are not neutral. They affect everything else in your life. There's nothing like a messed up love life to cause you emotional strain and a messed up work life and a messed up school life."
Pearson has also altered her course for people at risk for what she labels relationship turbulence. She's taught the Within My Reach program, which she coauthored, for the UW Odyssey Program, Milwaukee's Head Start, Operation Fresh Start, area high schools and other community groups.
"My focus on criminology led me to develop a keen focus on at-risk kids, adolescents and families," Pearson said. "Sure there are other very important factors like economics, culture and community. But family breakdown also has a huge impact on kids. That got me doing research on why some couples make it and others don't."
Five years ago, Pearson's class was featured in Time magazine, which called it a "new breed of romantic counseling — equal parts sex ed, social science and Dear Abby." The article said such classes offer healthy models of love that fill a void between an emotionless biology of sex education and preachy abstinence lectures.
Pearson can't be lumped in with either group. She speaks to gay couples, believes that planned commitment to a future together is more vital than a marriage certificate and has a strident emphasis on getting people safely out of harmful relationships, such as ones that involve domestic violence.
"As a political progressive and a feminist, I don't for one minute see (a relationship class) as the only thing that helps," Pearson said. "The good thing today is that there's growing agreement among liberals and conservatives that there really are distinct advantages for children when adults in the home have a stable relationship."
Pearson, 58, can attest to that. She's been married to her husband, Rob Kennedy for 25 years.
Her popular one-credit MATC relationship class, taught over the course of two full Saturdays, begins with students making drawings that respond to a phrase on the board: "Relationships (or marriages) today are like..."
Her most recent class produced drawings of a cheetah chasing a gazelle, a gold-digger, a road with potholes and couples writhing in agony in a trash can.
In other classes she asks participants to build a sculpture out of play dough, toothpicks, marshmallows and more to represent their relationship. "My class isn't therapy, but when you do different mediums, it gets people talking."
In this class, as well as her semester-long marriage and the family course, she talks to students about how the traditional road maps are gone.
"People don't ask people out on dates much anymore," Pearson said. "In old-fashioned dating things were a whole lot clearer. Somebody asks a person out. That indicates a clear intent."
Now hooking-up has replaced dating, which she dubs more sliding than deciding: People ending up having sex or living together without ever really making a thought-out decision.
When people have babies many take a birthing class and read such books as "What to Expect When You're Expecting." Pearson dreams of a day when couples approach marriage in much the same way, taking a skills-based class and making sure they have compatible expectations.
"How much do people spend on a wedding and how much time do they spend planning it?" she asks the class. Students suggest $10,000 to $30,000 and loads of time. She responds, "What if people spent even a tiny fraction of that preparing for a marriage?"
Forgive me, I’m a little bit inebriated. However I will take this one and run with it.
This generation (my generation) has not learned to socialize in the same way pervious generations have. We’re socially maladapted to life. I’ve seen people who are supposedly good friends walk up to each other and have a VERY awkward conversation, but they can SMS back and forth with ease. We’ve taken the “social” out of socializing.
Needless to say, this has caused a phase-shift in the dating world. People don’t know how to deal with each other. It is quite literally an alien world. Things that came naturally to the generation before us have been lost. It’s quite sad really. Were I sober, I’d have more to impart. Cheers!
bookmark
I’ll have what you’re having, LOL!
Sounded reasonable to me.
However, do we need a TEACHER at Taxpayer Expense teaching this in Science class? I think not.
Yea. She is really a looney one! Imagine, thinking that old-fashioned dating is better than just hooking up!
“People don’t ask people out on dates much anymore,” Pearson said. “In old-fashioned dating things were a whole lot clearer. Somebody asks a person out. That indicates a clear intent.”
Now hooking-up has replaced dating, which she dubs more sliding than deciding: People ending up having sex or living together without ever really making a thought-out decision.
I didn't read that it was a science class.
good gor her. people get divorced at the drop a hat with idiot “therapists” telling them “oh the kids’ll be fine”
As someone who drafts the stupid “Parenting Plans” required by the law, let me tell you, there is no joy to moving the kids around between homes like checkers on a board. The kids want to be in ONE stable home and do stuff with BOTH parents at the same time and they do NOT want to hear how awful the other parent is every other weekend
Yes. They’ll be trying to wring a little more money out of the divorce/cohabitation/child snatching industry with more romanticism (including feminism). Young men and women, choose your mates very wisely. Take years to do it. It’s you, your spouses and your kids against the neighborhood busybodies and the government.
I’m sorry, it’s a class unto itself. It, “...fill(s) a void between an emotionless biology of sex education and preachy abstinence lectures.”
There. That’s much better. Now my tax dollars are well spent to pay her salary because God Forbid our kids should actually learn Biology (you know, ‘Insert Tab A into Slot B and nine months later you’re a Mama!’), or have to put up with ‘preachy abstinence lectures.’ LOL!
In other words, a taxpayer funded ‘elective’ so students can just screw around and garner a few credits toward that oh-so-useful degree in Basket Weaving with a minor in World Peace. *Rolleyes*
Members of some families, BTW, do actively work to get to know members of other families in order break the other families. They do it to keep potential local business and job competition down. I’ve observed and analyzed those activities for several decades.
Here is another radical idea!
“”My focus on criminology led me to develop a keen focus on at-risk kids, adolescents and families,” Pearson said. “Sure there are other very important factors like economics, culture and community. But family breakdown also has a huge impact on kids.”
People have taken the people out of communication... They find it easier to hide behind a device to talk to others. They cannot communicate face to face.
That said, I think the secret to a healthy, long lasting relationship is easy. Just appreciate the other person, frequently communicate your appreciation, and remain willfully ignorant of their flaws.
Of course, being humans, we cannot effectively communicate wisdom nor truth to each other. Only experience can teach us. If we base our most significant relationship on the simple minded pursuit of quick pleasure (hooking up) without any basis in the substansive nature of what we truly need from a mate, then disaster (aka hilarity) will ensue.
Let the chips fall where they may. Let the MTV generation learn the hard way. They will understand when they try to pass along their (hard earned) wisdom to their children/grandchildren and fail. This is the human condition.
what are you getting at familyop
great recipe I like it
Do that and you don't have that fancy photo album to look at as you grow old together.
I don’t know if you can get what I’m having where you are. Sleeman No. 20 Anniversary Ale. It’s a GREAT beer!
Somebody needs to teach these kids what to do...their parents sure aren’t.
It seems that her ideas are very traditional. Dating instead of hooking up and teaching about how family problems hurt children, etc. I really believe that most young people are not prepared to find suitable mates and engage in a long, loving relationship of marriage. Maybe some that take her course will have better lives and maybe some will go on to teach how others may have better lives.
Anybody got a picture of this teacher? I’m trying to remember if I had a class with her. The name sounds familiar but I’m not sure.
Anyone who calls herself “progressive” instead of “liberal” has her head so far up her *ss she can bite her kidneys.
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