You can’t escape the holiday of romance coming up in barely a week. An Iowa State University professor offers something more practical than chocolate or flowers — a “Relationship Check-Up.” Doctor Robert Werner-Wilson says there are four parts to the checklist. It measures communication, affection, cohesion and consensus. He often gives each member of a couple the test — and may find they score differently, one for example scoring the “Affection” category as very high, the other as low, information which may surprise them. He’s found that, interestingly, often couples may have “a devil of a time agreeing on how to address a probloem,” that consensus issue on the checklist. They might have major differences on how to solve a problem — so that choosing a solution becomes their problem. Once they agree on what the problem is, he says then they work well together — the cohesion part of the list. And they may even be surprised to find the couple’s own view of their relationship differs from an outsider’s opinion. He says it’s an opportunity to evaluate the results and talk about with their partner, something many have never done. If they don’t know how to talk about a relationship, he says this is a way to start that conversation. The director of Iowa State University’s Marriage and Family Clinic, he says the point is to find out if two people have “fundamental mis-matches” about how they see the world and priorities. We joke about newlywed couples having to adjust but there are kernels of truth — there’s not a write way to hang the toilet paper, squeeze the toothpaste, but people tend to think that there are. When they find a partner thinks differently, he says it can lead to real trouble. He says some have different amounts of shyness or tendencies to show affection, and some have strong ideas about what men or women in general should be like.If women are raised to talk about emotions and think that expressing them is important, but men are raised to think they must be stoic and “tough it out,” their mismatches around gender socialization will cause problems when they find what they think is important in a relationship is different. The ISU Marriage and Family Therapy Clinic offers counseling on a sliding fee scale, and you can take the “Relationship Checkup” yourself and get an automatic analysis by surfing to http://www.fcs.iastate.edu/marriage/check-up.asp
