Healthy Marriages Grand Rapids

National Trend Toward Building Relationship Skills in Youth

Love U2 Program Leading the Way

Teens today live and breathe in a culture that touts casual sex and casual connections. Love U2® is a series of units that help young people acquire practical skills for emotionally healthy and ethically sound relationships. It focuses on helping teens craft a roadmap toward what they hope to achieve, not just what they must avoid.

The Love U2® series is a new kind of curriculum for teens. It looks beyond the "do's and don'ts" of sex - too often the focus of our conversation with teens - to the context of sexuality: namely, relationships. Its goal is to help young people acquire practical skills and useful knowledge for forming emotionally healthy, mutually respectful, and ethically sound relationships.

Teens today can't rely on relationships; even the most important family bonds sometimes cannot be counted on. Unfortunately, teens are short on positive models.

Love U2 ® focuses on helping teens craft a "North Star" - a vision of healthy relationships - that will guide their behavior now and into the future. Love U2 ® aims at giving teens a positive model for committed and healthy love relationships.  For more information click here. 

Lunchtime Education: The Marriage and Family Building Series

Question: Where can I get the latest information on how to help families and couples in my church or practice?

The Marriage and Family Building Series, now in its tenth year, is specifically designed to equip pastors, clinicians and lay-leaders with up-to-date and effective tools for strengthening marriages. 

The Series was created to address the needs of busy, overworked pastors, church staff, lay-leaders, and clinicians who have little time to keep up with the fast-paced and increasing demands of the hurting couples and families they serve. 

Timed over lunch (with lunch included) to minimize time away from work, and designed for "bullet-point" takeaways to maximize resource building, the series brings in a host of national and local experts on the topics of marriage and family.

The Series began this year with Dr. Derek McNeil, professor of Psychology at Wheaton College, on November 7.  Dr. McNeil spoke about how to make marriages more resilient, especially for those who are currently disillusioned and feeling hopeless.  The next Series event will be geared toward couples as a way of celebrating marriage month.  National author Dan Seaborn of Winning at Home will be talking about the "Necessary Nine" topics toward creating a wonderful marriage.  For more information on Dan Seaborn click here.

For more information about the Marriage & Family Building Series click here.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T Gets Its Due in The Third Option

The Third Option is a free peer ministry and a psycho-educational program. It combines a support group, mentor couples and workshops on relationship skills. The Third Option can be both a stepping-stone to counseling and/or an adjunct to it. The first workshop topic is on respect...

Option 1: Be a passive doormat.

Option 2: Be an aggressive pit-bull. 

Option 3:  Learn to find the middle ground of a healthy relationship: appropriate assertiveness.

The Third Option is helping couples in West Michigan improve their marriages by teaching them to value and respect each other. The definition of respect: how couples treat each other.

It doesn't matter whether a person agrees with their spouse in the moment or not.  What matters is being able to consistently treat them with respect.  For example, can each partner say they follow the Bill of Rights for Married Couples, which allows that each spouse has the right to:

1. Space and Privacy

2. Be Different

3. Disagree

4. Be Heard

5. Be Taken Seriously

6. Be Given the Benefit of the Doubt

7. Be Told the Truth

8. Be Consulted

9. Be Imperfect

10. Be Respected

For more information about The Third Option click here. 

SmartMarriage.com 

Feature of the Month

The Number One Predictor of Divorce is...

the habitual avoidance of conflict. 

The sad thing is couples often avoid conflict because they believe it will cause divorce.  Couples may come to the unfortunate conclusion, "Let's not talk anymore. That's when we have all our fights."

In the beginning, couples avoid conflict because they are so much in love and think that "being in love" is about agreeing.  They are afraid that if they disagree - or fight - they'll ruin their marriage.

Later, they avoid conflict because when they try to deal with differences, things get so out of hand they simply shut down. After a few bad blow-ups they become determined to avoid conflict at any cost.

Successful couples are those who know how to discuss their differences in ways that actually strengthen their relationship and improve intimacy. For more information from SmartMarriages founder Diane Sollee, click here.