Goodbye to jerk dating
Meghan Salinas, Associate Writer
Red chairs formed into a circle formation in the NGU’s Joyful Sound Conference Room at 4 p.m. on a Thursday; what a sight. Students across the room vary in age, relationship status, relationship experience and gender. With not knowing what to expect, I grab a seat and wait anxiously.
For the next few Thursdays in February, student life director, Jared Thomas, and counselor, Sara Black, will be leading “How to Avoid Falling in Love with a Jerk,” a free seminar open to all students who are prepared to evaluate a relationship before committing on an emotional level.
“This is not a seminar to insist that the way college students are dating is wrong,” said Thomas. “We have this seminar annually to work together as a body to discover how to building lasting relationships.”
The seminar started with an open-ended conversation called, “jerk warnings.” Some jerk warnings that were brought up were when:
1. A male/female lacks emotion or stability.
2. A male/female lacks basic relationship skills.
3. A male/female does not know how to balance the head and the heart when it comes to relationships.
The seminar is based off a book called, “How to Avoid Falling in Love with a Jerk” by John Van Epp.
Relationships are not supposed to move at the speed of light, and this seminar reminds students to put a sole focus on “knowing” our potential significant others well before getting too serious too quickly.
A visual that Thomas and Black showed the audience was the “RAM” model, which is the five different areas in which humans need to bond with one another.
1. KNOW
2. TRUST
3. RELY
4. COMMIT
5. TOUCH
These five areas need to be equally balanced in order to develop and maintain a healthy paced and lasting relationship. Black said, “The RAM model is a stair step effect. As in, we must develop a sense of knowing a potential prospect before trusting them, and so on.”
This discussion question based seminar is free for all students but so worth it. Interested? “How to Avoid Falling in Love with a Jerk” seminars will be held in the Joyful Sound Conference Room every Thursday at 4 p.m. Come and see what all of the talk is about and resist the next potential heartbreak.
