Counselor and Relationship Expert’s Online Resources Engage, Inspire All Stages of Marriage

Conversations about relationships can be difficult. It’s hard to put feelings into words, much less convey emotions and needs to your spouse without misunderstanding or hurt.

Relationship expert John Van Epp, Ph.D., founder of the Love Thinks programs, noticed this problem when he was conducting research for his doctorate degree. He was interested in discovering a way to explain the bonds that connect people using a visual model and descriptive language. John believed having better tools and words would enable people to understand what they were experiencing and empower them to communicate more clearly.

“When it comes to helping people change, definition empowers implementation. Only when you clearly understand a concept, can you translate that concept into life,” he said. John has compiled research from his years of teaching graduate courses in marriage and family with therapy experiences from his two decades of counseling in his private practice and his previous pastoral role in planting an Evangelical church in Northern Ohio to provide practical relationship resources that clearly define how to build and sustain healthy relationships.

John developed an evidence-based, Relationship Attachment Model (RAM) that captures the five dynamic bonds that comprise all relationships. And because the RAM portrays these five bonds on an interactive “mixing board,” it allows people to rate the strength of key relational areas while they visually profile their relationship.

“People couldn’t figure out how to have a common language to talk about their relationship – words can be so confusing. There is a lot of miscommunications between spouses when attempting to explain what is happening in their relationship,” he said.

When John was working on his doctorate in the 1980’s and had transitioned from pastoral ministry to a counseling practice, he identified five major bonding areas that powerfully impact human relationships but were typically viewed as independent of each other. These five dynamic bonds are the degree people know, trust, rely, commit, and touch another (touch can be nonsexual or sexual, depending on the nature of the relationship). The higher the level of each bond on the RAM then the greater the strength of that bond. However, John came to believe that these five areas are not discrete topics but parts of a whole — dynamic bonds that are related and constantly interacting with each other. A relationship is defined as “a connection between two or more people,” and these five areas are the specific connections or bonds that make up every relationship. So, he combined them together as a complete package in the RAM.

John explained, “It is important to point out that all five are also reciprocal—that is, you know a person who also knows you, trust a person who also trusts you, etc. However, just because each one is a ‘two-way street’ does not mean that they are the same level or strength for each person in the relationship!” 

Here is a more detailed explanation of each of the five relationship bonds in the RAM.

1. Know: How much you actually know someone, which requires the 3T’s—talking, togetherness in various situations and moods, and time. This is more factual and experiential knowledge.

2. Trust: This is the degree of security and confidence that you feel based on what you believe about somebody.  We all form opinions of others that produce some level of trust. We configure an image in our mind to represent someone, and that representation creates feelings of trust or mistrust. Therefore, we take what we know and then fill in the gaps of what we don’t know with our own projections to determine what we believe about someone—which may or may not be an accurate portrayal of what that person really is like.

3. Rely: How you meet each other’s needs. John noted this area is the most common topic of marriage help books. You could have strong trust, but not be meeting needs. This could be because of neglect, or simply because you are unavailable (e.g. traveling, deployed). When you rely on someone, there is an “exchange”—you are doing something for them that they want or need.

4. Commit: This is how invested you are, how you define the relationship. It generates a feeling of belonging. Commitment also involves what you sacrifice for a relationship and how you prioritize it.

5. Touch: This also is a powerful bonding stimulus. It includes touches of affection and friendship, and also interactions of sexual intimacy.

John began using this model in his counseling practice with tremendous results, eventually writing books and programs to incorporate its use. He retired his 25-year private practice and has been running Love Thinks, LLC full time for the past 12 years. His RAM is the core of all the content offered in LoveThinks resources, where the programs for singles, couples and families have been used to teach “more than a million people through non-profit and community organizations, high schools and universities, social agencies, juvenile and correctional facilities, churches and faith-based organizations, and in all 50 states, 10 countries and by more than 10,000 certified instructors,” according to his website. All his courses have both Christian versions and secular (community) versions.

His best-selling book, How to Avoid Falling in Love with a Jerk (or Jerkette) provides singles of all ages a roadmap for following their hearts without losing their minds. The RAM is implemented as a self-directing tool to pace a growing, new relationship. And his follow-up book, Becoming Better Together, helps couples in an established relationship to use the RAM to know how to easily identify slow leaks in their closeness and regularly strengthen the bonds of their relationship.

John’s daughter, Morgan Cutlip, Ph.D., works with John in the video courses, and engages in research and development of the growing body of Love Thinks content. She engages with over 110K followers on her MyLoveThinks Instagram. She has created content and courses for @FloTracker, the number one app in health and fitness and was a featured relationship expert for Teen Vogue. Together, they see their roles as experts guiding people with tools to understand and create more successful relationships.

There are three categories of the RAM-based programs: 1) Instructor-led courses in which individuals are trained and certified by John to personally facilitate the courses in live settings (these are found on www.LoveThinks.com); 2) Video-courses that people can subscribe to and engage in the privacy of their own home (these are found on www.MyLoveThinks.com); and 3) Small group video-based discussion studies that are used in church settings. These small group studies are included in an entire six-week churchwide series based on the RAM that includes sermons, video-based lessons for elementary kids, for middle and high school youth, and for adult singles and married couples (these are all found on www.RAMseries.com).

RAM SERIES: A TOTAL CHURCHWIDE HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP EXPERIENCE

John developed a complete package for churches to strengthen relationships across all aspects of a congregation. “Because the five bonds of the RAM apply both to our vertical relationship with God and to our horizontal relationships with others, the RAM helps us see the continuity of all relationships. The foundation of our relationships with others is our relationship with God—how we know God, how we should take what we know and put it into trust, then step out in reliance and commitment to God, and literally experience the touch of God in so many ways!” he said.

This six-week churchwide RAM series can be licensed by churches and includes customizable sermon manuscripts that first apply the RAM to building and sustaining a relationship with God, and then unpacks one RAM bond in each of five remaining messages with biblical insights and practical applications.

“One of the key benefits,” John explained, “is that both singles and couples are addressed in every message—this is a really big deal for pastors. Typically, they preach a marriage series but then all the singles feel left out. But with the RAM, for example, they can talk to singles about the importance of really getting to know a dating partner, and then transition to the couples and point out how important it is for them to stay in the know! I don’t know of any other series that is this all-inclusive,” John said. 

The entire church simultaneously goes through their respective studies during the six-week sermon series. The adults engage in one of two small group studies, one for singles and another for couples. In addition, elementary kids through middle and high school youth have video-based lessons that dovetail with the messages and apply the RAM to their most important relationships.

The two small group RAM courses are video-based discussion studies based on the instructor-led courses PICK (singles) and LINKS (couples). These two evidenced-based programs have been taught by certified instructors for over twenty years and were reformatted specifically for church home groups with short video lessons by John and Morgan. Both studies have been used by tens of thousands of singles and couples in churches throughout the U.S. They provide a common language based on RAM for all ages and statuses to talk about the best ways to build and sustain healthy relationships.

INSTRUCTOR-LED COURSES

There are six instructor-led courses from Love Thinks—and three are the “flagship” courses focused on singles, couples, and families. These courses are taught by over ten thousand Love Thinks certified instructors to over a million participants within the military, educational settings, community settings and churches. They are a great way for churches to continue to build on the six-week churchwide RAM series and conduct outreach to their communities.

John explains, “The gospel of Jesus will always be the message the church brings to world. But historically, the church has built the platform for the gospel by meeting the most dire needs of their culture. And the most relevant and crucial need today is relationships. People want help in their dating relationships, their marriages, and in how they are parenting and keeping balance within their personal and family lives. This is the great opportunity of the church—to step out of their campus and into their communities to offer courses that are skills-based, practical and transforming. It is this outreach ministry that builds the platform for the gospel to be shared.” 

OUTCOMES FROM LOVE THINKS IN CHURCHES, SCHOOLS AND COMMUNITIES

Love Thinks has seen concrete results. John remembered a retreat he led in Wisconsin for middle schoolers early in his career. Twelve years later, he received a physical letter from a newly engaged young woman who had attended the course. She said she had followed the practices he taught, which empowered her to make a wise selection when she was ready to marry.

“It was almost scary,” John confessed, “to realize you are really impacting people’s lives if they take it seriously.”

A perfect example is the far-reaching effects of Randy, one of the certified instructors in the PICK course.  He trained to teach How to Avoid Falling in Love with a Jerk in high schools in the Fresno, California area. The speaker reached 20,000 students over the course of the four-year grant cycle. Every school in this low-income, high-risk population wanted him to return. Randy shared with John that many times he would hear a student explain that they wanted to share with their single parent the same information that they were learning because they wanted to see better relationships for their mom or dad.

“The younger generation was watching their parents suffer in dysfunctional romantic relationships and wanted to help them,” he said. Randy coordinated with the English teachers to give extra credit for students who would write essays about what they learned in the “No-Jerks” class. “It was amazing how much they remembered and wanted to follow what they had learned,” he added.  Sadly, despite its success, the program’s funding was not renewed.

John and a co-author, J.P. De Gance just published a new book, Endgame: The Church’s Strategic Move to Save Faith and Family. In this book, they strongly affirm that the church has both the opportunity and responsibility to speak into this area of relationship health—first, within their own congregations and then, into their communities. They review the three-year beta study that was conducted by Communio (J.P.’s non-profit) in Jacksonville, Florida, that organized more than ninety churches to commit to promoting relationship programs in their churches within its Duval County, for three solid years. That county was considered one of the worst areas for marriage with the highest divorce rates in the state of Florida for the past fifty years. But by the end of the three years, the divorce rate had dropped by 24 percent, and for the first time, making it the one with the lowest divorce rate in the state of Florida.

John explains, “I absolutely believe that if churches within our country make a major paradigm shift in their priorities and budgets to regularly provide dating, marriage and family courses and programs to their congregations and as outreaches to their communities, that what was accomplished in Duval County Florida will be replicated throughout America. But only the church has the power and reach to make this a reality! I hope to do my part to ignite this mission across Christendom.”

The RAM model, book and relationship programs were awarded the Smart Marriage Impact Award in 2008 and have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Psychology Today, O Magazine, and Cosmopolitan. John has appeared on the CBS Early Show, Fox News, and Focus on the Family.

For more information about singles, couples, family or church programs, biblically based or secular, contact John and Morgan at www.LoveThinks.com. And check out what pastors are saying about the RAM churchwide series at www.RAMseries.com. And if you just want to take a dating or couples course online, then go to www.MyLoveThinks.com and sign up. You can also find free resources, an informative blog, and free daily relationship tips on Instagram at MyLoveThinks.