A CRASH COURSE ON LOVE, RELATIONSHIPS

By Yara Simon
Correspondent
Tuesday, November 4, 2008

After three years of research, one woman has designed a course that teaches the skills and knowledge for choosing well in love.

Isabell Springer, who is becoming licensed as a marriage and is a family therapist and is a doctoral candidate in psychology at Capella University.  She created "Driver's Ed for Love: A Roadmap for Successful Relationships" after she was devistated by the enormous pain and suffering that her clients felt from divorce.

Springer, who divorced herself after a long term marriage, said people think they are expected to "naturally know" how to be in relationships and it just isn't so.  Being in a relationship requires learned skill in order to increase the odds for successful love."

After reading books and Web sites about divorce and love relationships she created "Driver's Ed for Love," an activity-based course aimed to alleviate the more than 50 percent divorce rate by helping young people achieve success in their relationship by knowing how to assess a potential partner.

On Saturday, Springer will hold a course for high school students at the Tower Road Branch Library, 3020 SW 75th St., from 9:30 a.m to 4:30 p.m. To participate students must register on www.DriversEdForLove.com. The library holds about 40 people. The event is being sponsored by the library and there will be a free pizza lunch.

Springer said she has made the course fun, interactive and made "those nebulous adult concepts about love, easy to grasp, which is key." Her classes are targeted to a younger audience, some of whom have never been in a serious relationship.

"Academically, school gets you ready for a career," Springer said. "Socially and emotionally you get zip and this is the reason for the stagering divorce rates."

Springer said most books focus on the relationship after divorce has occurred, but she wanted to focus on helping people know what to look for in a partner. "I want people to have the knowledge and skills that were not available to me and my parents for matter" she said.

Springer said she has received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the participants who have taken her course. Graduate student Amy Mazak, 24, who attended  Springer's program last month, said the presentation was extremely powerful and informative.

"The age group being targeted is thinking of whether or not to marry," Mazak said. "It is a positive portrayal, unlike in the media, which focuses on the downsides to being married and failed relationships, with this kind on concrete knowledge, the odds for success are swung in your favor and away from divorce."

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

They say love is blind; but just as driving blind can lead to a collision, loving blind contributes to high divorce rates.
Young adults entering onto the boulevard of love need a driving course too. They need Driver’s Ed For Love.

GAINESVILLE, FLA., October 29, 2008 – Today’s young adults will make up a large portion of the highest divorce rates in the industrialized world, declares the U.S. Census Bureau. Driver’s Ed For Love believes that equipping people with real knowledge and skill will reduce this growing problem.

“Loving blind” means choosing a partner who is not right for you, a major cause of divorce every year. Teens and young adults are left particularly vulnerable due to two critical factors: 1) they have no relationship roadmap, and 2) they assume that they should naturally know how to be in relationships.

Compounding the problem, researchers say that young biological clocks are set to journey the highway of love before they are emotionally prepared. These drivers need something more than Sex Ed; they need a roadmap to success.

Driver’s Ed For Love is an activity-based course, founded in research and designed to teach young people the emotional components of love. Intervention is necessary before their road dead ends at unnecessary heartache or premature responsibility.

Driver’s Ed For Love alerts parents about the importance of observing their young drivers, and providing a compass to help them to navigate the highway of love. It is about making sound judgments and meeting your destination of a fulfilling and satisfying relationship.

As parents we teach our kids to walk and talk, tie their shoes, do math and science, and drive a car. We don’t, however, give them the critical skills and knowledge necessary to choose well in love. This leaves them ill prepared and alone with the odds stacked against them. Driver’s Ed For Love can change these odds.


For additional information visit: www.DriversEdForLove.com

CONTACT:
Isabell Springer
Isabell@DriversEdForLove.com
www.DriversEdForLove.com

Jan. 2010

            Isabell Springer’s driver’s education class has nothing to do with learning how to navigate around those bright orange traffic cones or the perfect execution of a tricky parallel parking job. It’s about steering along the foggy and congested highways of the heart.

            Springer, the course’s creator and a marriage and family therapist, led a workshop called Driver’s Ed For Love, an interactive course aimed toward teaching adolescents lessons on true love, healthy relationships and compatibility Nov. 22 on the University of Florida campus.

            Around 100 students attended the three-hour workshop at the Kappa Delta sorority house.

            Right away, Springer, a Gainesville native, clarified the difference between sex, love and infatuation, and how to recognize which of those situations a person is interested in.

“This is your journey,” she told the group. “You get to pick your partner and the kind of relationship you want. I’ve created the only program that lets you apply the knowledge to choose well.”

According to Springer, true love has two components: romantic attraction and emotional maturity. No relationship is complete without both parts, she said.“Without the emotional maturity, the romantic attraction is kind of destroyed,” Springer said.

Each participant was invited to complete a 30-question survey on both the romantic attraction and emotional maturity of a serious relationship, past or present. The score on the questionnaire translated into a number, one through six, which represents number on a die. Under Springer’s system, the higher the number, the more attracted or emotionally developed your partner is. For a relationship to work, a person’s numbers must match or be similar to his partner’s scores, Springer said.

Participants were then left to roll dice of their own and interpret what kind of relationships, healthy or completely dysfunctional, would come from whatever combination of numbers they rolled.

Junior Megan Blanchard said she made some “interesting matches” when she rolled her dice. I got a lot of good-looking, but immature people matched up with people the numbers say they would never be attracted to,” she said. “That would never work, but it was cool to analyze how different numbers are supposed to fit together and how it could fit into real life.”

The workshop also focused on things like listening skills and recognizing the main reasons why relationships fail.

            The culmination of all the lessons came in the final task, called the Relationship Smarts Challenge. In this game, Springer asked her students to strap on a blindfold as they took a small cup containing ten pennies. She then read ten statements about things talked about in the class. Each person had to choose whether the statement was true or false, and with each wrong answer, the person had to give up one of the pennies out of the cup, measuring how much progress was made in the short session.

            Sophomore Claire Lovell came away with seven pennies left.

            “I feel like I learned a lot about relationships and how to make them better,” she said. “This is really useful stuff, it was taught in a way that was easy to understand, and it’s something I’ll be able to incorporate into my everyday life.”

            Lovell also said she would attend the workshop again if given the opportunity.

            Springer said she formulated the idea for Driver’s Ed For Love after her own divorce left her heartbroken and searching for answers. She said she began looking for answers four years ago when she stumbled upon the same questionnaires she now uses in the program, something clicked, and she spent the next two years putting the program together.

            Springer also said she was especially excited to present her teachings to a group of college men and women. Sunday’s workshop was only her seventh class.

            “Sorority women are especially intimate and personal in nature,” she said. “They’re trying to be educated leaders, and they’re looking for something more. Plus, they bring a lot of men who want to participate too, and having both genders there is so important.”

            Springer said she hopes her appearance on UF’s campus will lead to more workshops in the future to a broader range of students at the university.

            “This is my population,” she said. “People at this age let me in and make me feel like I belong there. I come away knowing I mattered to at least one person, and I couldn’t ask for more.”

Jan 2010

Fifty percent of U.S. marriages end in divorce and heartbreak. Isabell Springer’s parents’ marriage did. Her marriage did.

She got angry. She wondered why. Now she’s doing something about it.

Springer is a psychology PhD candidate and the founder of Driver’s Ed for Love, a course designed to help young people shift the odds in their favor against divorce and toward a successful and lasting relationship. Rationing that there were courses that teach people how to drive, she wondered why there was nothing in place to teach them how to be in a relationship.

“It’s a huge void,” she said. “The need is gargantuan.”

Springer’s life has been a crash course in life without a road map. At a young age, her parents divorced, changing her childhood and her life forever.

“That was really heart-breaking for me. I wanted to be smarter and get it right.”

At age 30, with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in psychology in her back pocket, she married for the first time, thinking she’d done exactly that: gotten it right. Eleven years later, she was divorced.

“I said to myself, ‘It’s just not OK, and I want to find out why this is happening.’ I don’t go down without a fight,” she said.

A few years later while working on her PhD, she stumbled upon some research that made everything click: When evaluating a partner, you must separate your romantic attraction to that person from his or her emotional maturity.

That simple breakdown is the basis for Driver’s Ed for Love. Using the numbers on dice from one to six as a rating system, participants in the course take assessments to evaluate their relationship on the two levels, one being romantic attraction and the other being emotional maturity.

“I had no idea there was a way to choose. There’s an assessment that needs to take place. If I would have known, I would have been able to ask myself the questions,” she said.

During the 75-minute course, participants fill out the assessments and talk about the results and what they mean. The rest of the course is designed to show how to pick an ideal partner, how to resolve conflicts and work through them in a healthy relationship, and how to watch out for red flags that might pop up when dating. The class is interactive, with students breaking off into small groups for discussion and activities like true-or-false quizzes (Did you know that scientifically there’s hundreds of “the one” out there for everyone?).

Springer feels strongly that she would have made different choices if someone had given her the advice she today gives to others. Drawn to her ex-husband by a similar childhood experience, she only later came to realize that their shared bond did not equal true compatibility. It meant nothing.

“Here it is 2009 in the world – what are we thinking?” she said. “As a culture, people think we’re supposed to innately know how to be in a relationship. That’s ridiculous.”

Claire Lovell, a University of Florida sophomore and recent graduate of the course, said Driver’s Ed for Love gave her a new perspective when thinking about starting to date someone.

“I thought that if you just liked someone and liked the same things, it would be OK, but it’s not,” Lovell said.

“It teaches you how to be ready for a relationship,” she said. “You can see if the two of you are compatible for a long-term relationship. Otherwise, it’s a waste of time.”

Springer’s guidance often extends further than her course. Her step-niece, Olivia Donda, has been relying on her for advice for many years and sees Springer as a strong role model who understands how to squeeze the most out of life.

“Anything is possible in her mind,” Donda said. “She made this course from scratch; she built it from the ground up. I can look up to her and see that I can do anything I want to.”

As a recent first-time participant in Driver’s Ed for Love, Donda was surprised to see how easily the components of a healthy relationship were spelled out. Though she had taken her aunt’s advice on a personal level, hearing it as a well-developed ladder of clear-cut lessons made it that much simpler.

“I think the biggest thing you get from it is just helping to make decisions that make you happy and to be able to understand the decisions you’re making,” she said. “It’s really easy to understand.”

Last year, Springer had the program evaluated by a group of master’s students at the University of Florida. The team spent the semester researching the market conditions, evaluating the business practices of the organization and shadowing Springer at work. At the end, they came to only one conclusion. With a potential market of males and females from age 15 to 75, a massive void in anything similar and a huge cultural need, Driver’s Ed for Love was a “slam dunk” in the world of business.

For now, she is pitching the course to sororities and athletic departments, as she sees them as organizations of future leaders. She’s spoken to UF’s head basketball coach, Billy Donovan, and hopes to present Driver’s Ed for Love to his team. Eventually, she’s like to franchise the business, training future site coordinators who could in turn open storefronts across the world equipped with her knowledge of relationships and message of tough love.

“It’s such a basic fundamental need in the world. It’s like the whole world is hemorrhaging, and I just show up with my first aid kit to see what I can do,” she said. “I’m just gonna go one at a time.”

“What I want people to take away from this is we’re not going to be lucky in love. We’re going to pick it.”