How to Avoid Falling in Love with a Jerk

Van Epp is an American psychologist and counselor who spent years working with couples and single people in the process of choosing a partner. He noticed a pattern that kept repeating in his office: almost nobody commits to the wrong person because of a lack of intelligence, but because the emotional bond moves faster than real knowledge about the other person.

From that observation he created the RAM, the Relationship Attachment Model, a way of seeing a relationship not as one single feeling, but as five strands that slowly weave together: knowing, trusting, relying on the other person, committing, and physical touch.

The book grew out of the PICK program, used in marriage preparation courses in churches, colleges, and even the U.S. armed forces, and it became popular for turning therapy theory into a simple chart, the kind you can scribble on a bar napkin while explaining to a friend why that romance moved way too fast.

Van Epp pictures a relationship as five lines rising together, each resting on the one before: first you get to know the person, then you trust them, then you rely on them for everyday things, then you truly commit, and only then does physical touch keep pace with that growth.

The central idea of the book is simple to state and hard to practice: none of those five lines should run far ahead of the one before it. Trusting someone you barely know is as risky as relying on someone you don't really trust yet.

Think of a couple who already live together, meaning they have moved ahead in committing, but still don't know how the other reacts when they lose a job or when the mother-in-law calls to demand something, a sign that knowing fell behind. For the author, this mismatch between the lines is the engine behind a good share of fights that seem to come out of nowhere.

The most common mistake, according to the book, is not choosing wrong once, it is letting the heart rush relying and committing ahead of time. A person in love feels they already trust, can already count on the other, already want to commit, even after only a few dates.

The risk grows when physical touch enters the relationship too early, because intimacy releases a feeling of closeness that clouds judgment and makes it seem like the other four dimensions have moved ahead too, even when they are still at the beginning.

A common example in everyday American life is the couple who swap house keys or vanish from their circle of friends after three weeks of dating. Getting close fast is not wrong, the problem is getting close fast in commitment and intimacy without getting equally close to knowing the person behind the infatuation.