Love, Firsthand Husband And Wife Teach Relationships By Baring Their Own

Steve McCornack and Kelly Morrison are almost old enough to be the parents of the hundreds of Michigan State University students slumped in their seats in this huge auditorium, their jeans baggy, their hair mussed, their libidos pumping, their hearts hungry for lasting love.

Instead, because Steve and Kelly are NOT their parents, the couple can talk honestly about love.

They’re so open about their own coming-of-age that every student knows the names of Steve’s old girlfriends (Kim, Julie, Lisa and Michelle) and knows how annoyed Kelly was to learn that Steve still — unwittingly — carried a photo of Michelle in his wallet.

Married 10 years, raising two toddlers, professors Steve and Kelly consider it their mission to teach young men and women the truth about romantic love, based on the best research and their own experience.

Their most important message: Commitment is a journey, not a destination.

Standing twice a week before 430 students, they have turned Communications 225, “Introduction to Interpersonal Relationships,” into one of the most popular courses on campus.

What students say they see, in their 180 minutes of exposure to Steve and Kelly each week, is a couple who tell their common stories differently, but with respect for the other’s version. They tease each other. They praise each other. They laugh a whole lot.

Many students in Comm 225 have never seen a good relationship, up close and in action. Their parents are divorced, or distant and rarely discuss the fine points of tending a long-term relationship with their kids — or may not know themselves what they are.

As a result, young people end up sour on love, or end up believing Hollywood’s portrayal: Love is about heavy breathing.

What Steve, 36, and Kelly, 33, do best is illustrate the mundane dailyness of togetherness.

In their own beat-up jeans, white socks and boots — Steve with diamond studs in his ear and silver bracelets on his wrist, Kelly in a wash- and-wear hairdo they take on this hungry, cynical crowd.

Working together, unable to fake a cooperative approach, they transmit to students insight and research on attraction, falling in love, commitment, infidelity, jealousy, gender differences and the like - much of which contradicts the popular myths.

Men are not, for example, indifferent to relationships. Instead, research shows men tend to be more sentimental, and women more practical, about love.

“The biggest mistake young people make,” Kelly says, “is buying into movies and TV, that you gotta have passion. When the passion goes away and you’re feeling attracted to someone else, you think the relationship must be over.”

They joke they could become the anti-passion gurus. They say passion cannot, by nature, last. Focus instead on things that can: affection, respect, friendship with your mate.

Ask Kelly, for example, why she lets Steve tell so many stories about his old lovers, and she’ll say, “Because they’re funny! And they make me look better.”

Plus, of course, the old girlfriend tales make points. Michelle, for example, is what communications jargon would call a “perceived threat.” Steve dumped her more than a decade ago, but she keeps sending postcards to him - and a photo of herself in a little black dress - that Kelly finds threatening.

Plus, several years ago, she discovered Michelle’s photo in Steve’s wallet.

Students love this story, groaning at Steve’s haplessness - he’d forgotten the photo was there - and moaning to imagine Kelly’s reaction.

The lesson of the tale: A threat doesn’t have to be real to stir jealousy. A guy is wise to take his partner’s pain seriously and talk about how to cool it.

Steve and Kelly unfolded the Michelle story over 10 minutes, speaking the lines they spoke as they lived it, playing off each other as agilely as Dharma and Greg.

Getting there wasn’t easy.

Steve, an indifferent student, dropped out of college the first time, drove semi-trucks, played in a rock band and learned hard lessons about love.

All the wrong women he picked did him a favor, though. By deceiving him in matters of money and sex, they eventually drove him back to school to study the science of interpersonal deception.

He’s now among a handful of experts in the nation. He talks so much about spotting liars in Comm 225 that one student archly noted on his evaluation: “Now I know how to lie successfully.”

Kelly met Steve at the University of Illinois. She was an undergrad. He was a graduate student, teaching a course on relationships similar to the one they co-teach now.

He hated her from day one. She always blew in at the last minute, in sweats, and seemed to sneer at him. Her wit was razor sharp - too sharp, some days, for his own insecurities.

And he figured her “a party chick” - until she aced his midterm in record time.

That night, she was among the students who joined him at a local bar.

They drank late.

He offered to walk her home.

She said no, thanks.

He persisted.

“If I’d listened to you, this never would have happened,” Steve cracks in the living room of their East Lansing home, as their boys, 4-yearold Kyle and 2-year-old Colin, slumber upstairs.

They disagree on exactly where on that walk they first kissed but agree the passion scared them. They vowed the next morning to cool it until the term - and their student-teacher relationship - was over.

That vow lasted four days. After that, they spent almost every day and night together, although not without some friction.

Kelly refused to talk about the course for ethical reasons.

And by Week 3 she was pessimistic about the future.

As they tell their classes now, Kelly proclaimed one day, “I don’t know if we’re going to make it. We fight all the time!”

Steve thought, “Fight?!? We’ve had one fight! I’m used to fighting three times a day!”

They had to resolve their different styles of dealing with conflict.

They joke that they both grew up “victims of functional families.” Kelly’s parents have been married 37 years now, and Steve’s 42. But neither learned much from their parents about fighting.

Steve, though, liked to get problems out in the open quickly; Kelly was afraid of sparks and tended to tuck problems away to fester.

She’s learned to give voice to her anger sooner. Her goal? Within an hour.

They tell students nothing predicts happiness in a long-term relationship more than an ability to resolve conflict.

“Not how often you have sex,” says Steve.

“Not who does the housework,” says Kelly.

After getting an undergraduate degree in marketing, Kelly worked selling laser-cut, steel-ruled die boards to the folding carton industry. After they married in 1988 and moved to East Lansing for Steve’s teaching career, she sold textbooks for a while, returned to school only in 1991, and earned a Ph.D. in interpersonal communications.

“The way Steve talked about teaching,” she says, “it sounded like fun.”

In their life now, they pay maids to clean the house occasionally. They share child-care chores, keeping their sons in child-care for six hours each weekday.

Besides their MSU work, Kelly, a childhood gymnast, teaches aerobics three times a week, and once, while 8 months pregnant, did a cartwheel to wake up an 8 a.m. class. Steve teaches karate, and likes to go down to the basement to play his drums. Every Thursday afternoon, they swim together for an hour.

“Our date,” Kelly calls it. “Pretty pathetic.”

“Students probably see us as much more lively than we are,” admits Steve. “We joke about being boring - even though we’re not bored at all.”

Neither longs for what they had. A perfect evening is hanging out at home with good books - ideally together on the couch, Kelly says. They don’t even drink much anymore. A batch of brownies and fresh pot of decaf at night is thrill enough.

And in 12 years together, they’ve learned some surprising things about themselves and what they have together - much of it supported, of course, by research findings.

Those insights sound startling to students.

Such as this one: passion has a chance only when it isn’t pushed. Long-term couples who claim to have frequent sex are having routine sex.

“Our belief,” says Steve, “is that less sex - within reason - can actually translate into more passion” if a couple waits till both are ready.

“Most of the couples we know who are long term and still really hot for each other tend to be twice-a-month couples.”

STEVE AND KELLY’S RULES OF LOVE 1. Abandon the passion delusion. Passion declines over time. This is natural and normal, not horrible. 2. Romantic feelings can’t be forced. You can’t talk yourself into falling in love. Nor can you engineer situations to stir passion you don’t feel. 3. Relationships are hard work. You must constantly put effort into maintaining a relationship, just as you would a career, or a car. 4. Commitment is a process. Once a commitment is agreed upon, it will not stay alive if it’s left alone. The same effort that created the commitment must be invested each and every day. 5. Maintain independence and solitary outside activities. Most long-term vital couples spend a fair amount of time apart from each other, pursuing separate interests and hobbies that fulfill them. 6. But cultivate mutual interests and activities, too. 7. Discuss honesty rules. Negotiate exactly what you must tell each other — about the past and the present — and what, if anything, is best left unsaid. 8. Confront conflict. Many relationships are slowly destroyed as partners avoid discussing issues about which they disagree. 9. Foster friendship. A romantic relationship survives when two people get along as friends, day to day, with affection and respect.