Wedding bliss ends when a jerk enters the picture.
The Alabama Community Healthy Marriage Initiative and the Circle of Care Center for Families hosted the first of a four-part seminar series on marrying a jerk.
"How to Avoid Marrying a Jerk: The foolproof way to follow your heart without losing your mind," is based on a book by John Vann Epp.
Joanne Kehoe, who works with Circle of Care, and Jeremy Walden, an instructor within the Communication and Journalism Department, taught the class.
"These curriculum are to strengthen families," Kehoe said.
Circle of Care is a marriage and family education center in Valley that works in association with the Alabama Community Marriage Initiative and offers classes for middle-school age children all the way up to adults.
"We offer classes for very different family situations," Kehoe said. "We want to strengthen the family at home for children, and strengthening couples is a big part of making a family stronger."
Both Kehoe and Walden emphasized to participants that the class is skill-based, not therapy.
The program is designed for a small group and is intended to be interactive.
"We can learn about how to avoid marrying jerks from each other as well as from the book this program is based on," Walden said. "You never know who could learn from your experiences, so don't be afraid to share them during the class."
The class opened with an ice-breaker game of "Would You Rather?" which asks a series of questions with two possible answers and requires players to pick one. All participants agreed during the last question that they would rather date someone with three eyebrows than three nostrils.
Once the participants, who covered a wide demographic spanning a diverse age group, finished the game Walden began speaking.
"This whole class boils down to making really good decisions about relationships," Walden said. "We're going to teach you how to identify jerks early on in any kind of relationship, including work relationships and friendships."
Kehoe emphasized the class would be learning about "jerks and jerkettes," saying both genders are equally capable of bad behavior in relationships.
"We thought mostly engaged couples would come to this class, but we've had mostly singles or people divorced or separated attend," Kehoe said.
This was true of the Thursday evening class, composed of a mix of single parents, divorced women and people in relationships or fresh out of them.
"All of us, from time to time, act like jerks and apologize," Kehoe said. "We're going to differentiate between that and the jerk that Van Epp is talking about."
Participants defined a jerk as someone who is selfish, possesses no ability to compromise and has no respect for different people or points of view.
Kehoe emphasized that most people show these qualities at one time or another, recognize their mistake and apologize. She distinguished jerks as those who display these behaviors consistently.
One participant, who wished to remain anonymous, attended the seminar to "see what to do to stop attracting jerks" and learned "they may not be willing or able to change."
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