Seminars Dealing With Rejuvenating Your Romance Abound

To the recorded sounds of “Love Will Keep Us Together,” “The Wedding Song” and “I Won’t Last a Day Without You,” 31 women take their seats in a room above a pizza restaurant in El Toro.

It’s just before 7 on a Monday night and the women are trying to decide whether to sign up for six sessions of a workshop entitled, “Light His Fire.” To help them decide, framed pictures line the walls, each depicting a serene scene and bearing an inscription such as, “Real Love Begins When Nothing Is Expected in Return.”

A striking woman in her 40s, married for 17 years and one of several in the room who have been through the workshop before, is trying to convince the first-timers to sign up.

“One day I went to lunch and didn’t come home for 11 months, two weeks and four days,” she said. Everyone laughs, but there are murmurs and understanding nods. The woman said she has “been home for a year now,” and it becomes clear that that’s what is at stake here: potentially desperate situations and disrupted lives.

Ellen Kreidman, the workshop director, steps to the microphone and, reminiscent of speakers at real estate seminars, tells the women they can get rich quick. But she is promising them something more powerful than money--love.

“I have a marriage I’ve always dreamed about,” she said. “In six weeks, you can have the marriage you dreamed of.” To encourage the single women to take the class, she said: “You’ll be in the most wonderful relationship you ever dreamed of in six weeks.”

wonderful relationship you ever dreamed of in six weeks.”

Frightened by AIDS and horror stories from divorced friends, many men and women are trying harder these days to salvage marriages or live-in relationships. Psychologists and others say that the swing toward improving long-term relationships is the natural counter-reaction to the drive in recent years toward self-expression and the sometimes obsessive pursuit of professional success.

Having decided that committed relationships are now more important, men and women are looking for ways to rejuvenate their unions.

To help them, a number of seminars and workshops has surfaced in Orange County aimed at improving relationships. Some deal with the serious business of male-female communication, others with the more lighthearted aspects of romance.

And rather than being the near-exclusive province of women--as has historically been the case with human relations seminars and workshops--the current crop of seminars is attracting men. At a workshop conducted several months ago by Lola and Hank Gillebaard, dealing with putting more romance in life, 25 men showed up. And no women.

“We even waited five extra minutes before starting, which we never do,” Lola Gillebaard said. “It just didn’t seem right, but a woman never did show up.” She thinks one reason men are attending such workshops now is because they “have always feared loneliness more than women do, but they’re willing to admit it more now than before.”

Like many workshop sponsors throughout the county, Kreidman has never had a private practice in psychology. But that hasn’t deterred people from signing up for her class. Since May, 1981, when she held her first women’s class, 2,775 have “graduated.” A twin class for men, entitled “Light Her Fire,” started four years ago and has attracted 300, she said.

But while Kreidman’s six-week course (a total of 12 hours of class time) is the longest-running and probably the most ambitious in Orange County, it is by no means the only outlet for people who want to make love and romance bloom. For example:

In Huntington Beach, the night after Kreidman’s class, 13 people (eight women and five men) paid $19 to attend a one-night workshop at Golden West College entitled “The Romantic and Unusual in Southern California.” The seminar is also available at North Orange County Community College and Orange Coast College.

On a recent Saturday at UC Irvine, about 65 people were expected to pay $65 for a one-day seminar entitled “On Love: Smart Choices, Foolish Choices” and conducted by Los Angeles psychologist and author Melvyn Kinder. According to UCI officials, Kinder canceled his appearance. Another workshop is scheduled for later this month, entitled “Burnout in Marriage: Keeping the Spark Alive.” That seminar will cost $67.

At Orange Coast College, more than 25 workshops are available this semester dealing with male-female relationships and generally costing about $20. That contrasts with “10 at the most” that were available just a few years ago, a college official said.

The Gillebaards, married for 34 years, have been conducting workshops for the last year in Orange County, charging anywhere from $25 to $45. The workshops have included “How to Put More Romance in Your Life,” “Romancing Your Mate for Life,” and, their latest one, “How to Stay Happily Married.”

At Rancho Santiago College in Santa Ana, the most popular extension course about relationships is entitled, “Three Essentials to a Successful Marriage” and costs a couple $70 for the three-session course.

In Laguna Hills, psychotherapist Rhea Vogt recently offered a free workshop entitled “Relationships: Problem or Pleasure.” Forty people attended.

Next month in Orange, staff members at the Pilgrimage Family Therapy Center will hold two six-week workshops entitled “Is Your Marriage All That It Can Be?” The workshops will incorporate gospel principles and modern psychology.

Barbara Ramsay-Harkins took Kreidman’s class on the advice of a professional counselor. A divorced mother of two in her mid-30s, Ramsay-Harkins was thinking of remarriage when she signed up. The man who would eventually become her second husband took the men’s course.

Ramsay-Harkins’ motivation, she said, was to avoid making the mistakes in her second marriage that she made in her first and to make sure that she was ready for a second committed relationship. “In my first marriage, I was a Stepford wife,” she said. “There we were--we truly were the Stepford couple. He was very successful, we had two wonderful children, the country club set, new car every year--it was the perfect life. We did everything right, just the way people told us, but there was a shallowness and I was playing a role rather than having a relationship.”

Although she said she was willing to be a single parent, Ramsay-Harkins, now 37, said she believes a committed relationship is the best route to personal growth. “I don’t think I can grow as a single person,” she said. “When you have another human being who’s interested in growing and learning and loving and living, that’s the way you really grow.” On Valentine’s Day, 1987, she married for the second time.

“We’re nearing the end of an era where people put materialism and careers first,” said Robert Badal, who conducts workshops on romance throughout Southern California.

Badal, a financial planner by trade, said: “One of the things that’s occurring now is that finance-seminars enrollments are diminishing. They were the rage for a while. People are not signing up now. People are saying, ‘I worked out my career, now I want to have a relationship, because I’m not happy.’ ”

Badal said most of the interest in his seminars comes from people in relationships. A seminar entitled “Living Single in Orange County” was his most popular in recent years, but he recently canceled that class because, inexplicably, only one person showed up.

Judy Lloyd, the spokeswoman for the UCI extension program, said the interest in relationships seminars is similar to a trend in the late 1970s. “The late ‘70s was sort of a ‘me’ generation and everyone was interested in relationships,” Lloyd said.

“The enrollment in our psychology courses was just booming. In 1979, enrollment in psych classes peaked at 3,810 students. As we got into the early ‘80s and careers became the real focus, career classes took off and things like psych and things more touchy-feeley started to bottom out. In 1981-82, we only had 1,100 people taking psych courses. We had a course then called “Intimacy in Relationships” and it had to be canceled because the interest just wasn’t there. But now the trend seems to be swinging back and people are coming off the career courses and looking around and getting a bearing on relationships again,” she said.

But while the late ‘70s courses dealt largely with self-exploration, most of the classes offered throughout the county now focus on romance, monogamous relationships and that once feared word--marriage.

“This is the first time we’ve used the word ‘marriage,’ Lola Gillebaard said of the workshops she and her husband conduct. “When we first began these (about a year ago), I told Hank, ‘Don’t use the word “married.” Say “relationship.” ’

“That definitely has changed, because on the way to our last (workshop), I said, ‘Don’t forget the title is “How To Stay Married.” He said, ‘Does that mean I can say “married” as often as I want to?’ I said, ‘yes.’ ”

While struggling couples in years past might have been quicker to divorce, Lola Gillebaard said she thinks they are trying harder to stay together now. “I don’t see desperation, but I see a real longing, a real need. In the beginning, when we did romance seminars and then one on how to choose your mate, people were looking for somebody. With AIDS, the direction has gone back to sticking with what you have, making the most of what you have.”

Divorce is certainly not passe, but the seemingly inexorable march of the late ‘70s toward ending every marriage in America has slowed. In Orange County, there were 1,150 fewer divorces in 1987 than in 1978--despite the county’s rapid growth. In the past five years in the county, the number of divorces has ranged only from 13,788 to 13,991. In 1987, there were 49 more divorces than in 1986.

Like many of the others offering workshops in the county, the Gillebaards are not professional psychologists.

“People are tired of listening to psychologists who are screwed up themselves,” Badal said. “People heard all the experts in the ‘60s and ‘70s and they don’t see these experts with someone on their arm and making someone happy,” Badal said. “What they see are them writing how-to books. I think they’d rather hear from a romantic and a poet than hear about someone conducting a study in Vienna where they found that laboratory rats mate better if you play soft music.”

Jana Lynn Carlton, a consultant with a personnel service in Orange County, offers about four workshops a month in the Anaheim area on “Romantic Things to Do in Orange County.” She said the workshops are popular because societal trends are geared toward more romance and intimacy, and many people are out of practice in such things.

“I think all this goes in with wanting to have the perfect life,” she said. “Everybody’s trying so hard to be in the yuppie syndrome, where you have to have the right car, the perfect job, the perfect life, the perfect children. . . . And doing all these other things doesn’t lend itself to a romantic life, because you’re so busy you don’t have time for it. You feel successful, but you feel, ‘What am I doing it for; what am I getting out of it?’

“Now people are saying, ‘I’ve done it and I’m getting nothing out of it,’ and it’s time to go into another area, so people are looking (at their relationships) and trying to make that perfect, too.”

Allan Willey, 50 and twice divorced, attended one of the Gillebaards’ seminars because, he said, “I think I need help.”

Willey, a financial planner from Irvine, said he took the seminar for the same reasons someone signs up for an academic class. “There are a lot of things that we just go through in life that we don’t take the trouble to learn about. . . . In the areas of personal relationships, it dawned on me maybe I should go and get some formalized learning. We all assume we know these things, but what I learned from Lola and Hank is that you’ve got to work on it. We just assume it comes naturally. It doesn’t.”

Asked why that has become a priority now, Willey said: “You’ve got to use the word AIDS. Also, life is exciting these days; there’s lots of things to do and it’s far easier if you do it with a mate. It’s far more pleasurable. . . . It’s easy to date, but I want a more satisfying, deeper relationship.”

Jim Clancy, a marriage and family therapist in Orange, said: “We’re starting to see a renaissance of some of the values you saw in the ‘60s. You’re seeing less emphasis on ‘how much money can I make?’ and more on quality of life and relationships and families.”

That’s not to say that the late 1980s is another Age of Aquarius, Clancy said. “People are taking the whole mating, dating complex more seriously. In that way, it’s different from the ‘60s. We’re not talking about free love. We’re talking about having a genuine interest in grounding one’s self in some kind of relationship.”

Ellen Kreidman, married for 21 years and the mother of three, may be the Joan Rivers of Orange County workshops. Of the personable, fast-talking native New Yorker’s two-hour workshop, a friend once said of Kreidman: “She inhales at 7 and exhales at 9.”

Clearly, Kreidman has tapped a mother lode of interest in keeping marriages or other relationships intact. In the program’s first year, she said, she had 280 graduates. Last year, 520 women completed the course, and she’s expecting more than 600 in this 12-month period ending in May.

Her message to women is an amalgam of various themes often heard during the “pop psych” era of the ‘70s and ‘80s, but which offers a clear distinction from the feminist movement.

While Kreidman stresses self-esteem and self-worth to women, she also tells them: “The only way things change is if you change. The only way it gets better is if you get better.”

And if the woman’s outlook toward her partner changes for the better, she said, the man will respond in kind. If a woman makes her partner feel like he is the most important person in the world, she tells them, “there’s nothing he won’t do for you.”

Kreidman humorously acknowledges to the women in her class that deferring to a recalcitrant mate might make them want to gag, but she insists they try it. If they do, they’ll like it, she said.

The men’s class grew out of a demand from the women, Kreidman said. And while she teaches women to see from the man’s point of view, she reverses that in the men’s classes. Kreidman said that while women have become angry at men over the years for their lack of sensitivity toward relationship-oriented problems, the men have a legitimate cop-out.

“Nothing’s been available to them,” she said. “Let’s say you have a man who says he’d love to pick up an article on how to be a better husband or boyfriend. He can’t go to the newsstand and get that. Every magazine, every article is written for women. A woman could pick up 25 magazines or articles immediately on specific things she could do to improve herself personally, but where does a man turn?”

A psychology and education major in college, Kreidman said her credentials are a happy marriage and the testimonials from graduates of her class.

“The best way not to have a boring relationship is not to be a boring person,” Kreidman said in an interview in her El Toro home. “Romance is a learned technique. I can teach that what real romance is, is sending out vibrations to your spouse about their specialness and their desirability and letting them know that in this mad rush of life, that they are more important than anything else in this world.”

Kreidman doesn’t tout her course as a save-the-marriage mission. In fact, many of the women who take it aren’t in unhappy marriages.

Kay Steele of San Clemente, married for 22 years and who said her relationship with her husband is “wonderful,” signed up for the course last month on a friend’s recommendation. “To me, marriage is a commitment,” Steele, 50, said. “You see these people getting divorced after 17 years and it’s too bad something can’t be done to salvage it. You have a lot invested after that much time. I think for a while divorce was fashionable, but not anymore.”

With the AIDS threat, she said, “People are kind of afraid to go out there and be single. Several women I know who are single, it’s a whole different kind of thing for them now. . . . They’re really afraid to have a relationship, and who can blame them?”

C.J. Prentice, 31, is a happily married woman who is taking Kreidman’s class. Prentice said she signed up because she and her husband, Tom, “want to make our relationship the most important thing in our lives. When you have two people really working together, you can do almost anything.”