Learning to Love

Haley Pilgrim and her husband (pictured above, at their wedding) benefit from what Pilgrim learned in her Marriage 101 class.

By Alina Dizick

Nearly 10 years after Haley Pilgrim (BS15) took the class affectionately known as Marriage 101, she emailed instructor Alexandra Solomon to tell her the course had been life-changing.

One of Pilgrim’s takeaways—which she eagerly shared with her partner—was that it’s never too early to begin working on a relationship. After just three months of dating, the two started counseling.

Her partner says it was that early couples therapy “that led us confidently down the aisle,” wrote Pilgrim, who married him in 2022. “We owe this strong foundation to the lessons I learned from you.”

Long before the internet turned romantic relationships into a maze of swipes, curated profiles, and status updates, SESP launched a groundbreaking course called Building Loving and Lasting Relationships: Marriage 101.

Twenty-five years later, it’s still the most popular undergraduate offering at Northwestern, with its coveted 110 slots filling up in minutes each year. Despite the course name, long gone is the assumption that everyone is going to get married.

This is especially true given plummeting rates of marriage and an increasingly diverse outlook on what makes successful intimate relationships, says clinical psychologist Alexandra Solomon (MA98, PhD02), a SESP lecturer, author, and podcast host who leads the class every spring with the help of master’s students.

 “The heart of the class is helping students understand their own relationship to relationships,” says Solomon, who also shares insights with her more than 220,000 Instagram followers.

“It’s a class about relational self-awareness—helping you understand who you are in the context of romantic relationships.” The course has evolved with the times, covering such issues as conflict, relationship boundaries, breakups, and parenthood.

 “Now we talk about long-distance relationships, dating apps, hook-up culture, and polyamory—the topics are expansive and inclusive,” Solomon adds. The class encourages students to get into the nuts and bolts of modern relationships. Students interview couples, including their own parents.

Breakout groups are led by graduate students studying to become marriage and family therapists. “It was a mix of standard lectures on psychological theory but also small group discussions about actual relationships and what those were like,” says Barry Goldberg (BS05), a writer and editor at the Partnership for Public Service, who took the class in 2004. “Parts of it were very intimate—you had to be really comfortable sharing personal things with people you didn’t really know. There was value in that, but I hadn’t expected it going in, and I wasn’t ready to share stuff.”

In one class, Goldberg got the lowdown on the early days of parenting after hearing from a sleep-deprived couple with a newborn baby. “I was 20 and had an idealized view of what relationships should be like,” he says. “It was good to hear people cut through the fairy tale.”

Another couple, when asked how they dealt with conflict, said to the delight of the class, “We just get naked,” recalls Ellen Slater (BS06), a couples therapist in Winthrop, Washington.

“The class brought a lot of humor to learning about relationships,” says Slater, who brings to her practice the conflict resolution skills she learned in the course. “It taught me that marriage is very hard and to not be caught up in delusion. This was a standout course—even my family knows about it.”

No one talks about the challenges

Arthur Nielsen, a couples therapist and clinical professor of psychiatry at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, launched the course with SESP professor Bill Pinsof in 2000 (when Solomon was a doctoral student).

They had spent an entire year designing it, reviewing literature, and interviewing 15 couples therapists in preparation. The therapists had observed in their work that when parents didn’t know how to manage conflict, their children likewise often didn’t learn those skills—thus missing out on life lessons essential to healthy relationships.

Nielsen, who is also on the faculty of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, noticed that most people had few role models outside of family. He felt that bringing the science of relationships into an academic setting could change that.

Students were asked to focus on themselves and keep a journal related to their own relationships. One exercise prompted student pairs to argue while their classmates looked on and made suggestions.

“Some would try to say the wrong things to see what would happen,” Nielsen says. Timing was important, too. Giving college students—those presumably not yet thinking about marriage—the skills to thrive in relationships before they found their mate was a draw, he says.

“We tried to get people before they were married, because they often end up with precisely the wrong person. In college, they’re at an age when they are capable of really learning from ideas presented in class.”

“Mom, why did you marry Dad?”

Goldberg, who hadn’t really talked to his parents about their relationship, interviewed them separately for the class. He realized they married at age 23, and “both said they didn’t feel like fully formed adults” at the time and had changed a lot since. He ended up marrying when he was 38.

“I wanted to straighten stuff out for myself before sharing my life with another person,” he says. The course is slightly more popular with women and students who have come from challenging family environments, Solomon says.

But rather than provide students with frameworks, the class almost immediately helps them deploy tools in their own relationships. “They learn there’s a higher ceiling for what’s possible in a relationship, especially students from families that struggle or those who had a front-row seat to divorce,” she says.

After Pilgrim took the class, she thought some lessons were so important that she forwarded her notes to her closest friends. Simply knowing one tidbit—that breakups can affect people chemically, like drug or alcohol withdrawal—helped her cope during her dating years.

But the most valuable lesson was that “a happy marriage isn’t finding the perfect person—it’s about showing up as best you can for your spouse,” says Pilgrim, who now works at consulting firm Publicis Sapient. “It’s about understanding your own triggers so you can be a better partner.

EMOTIONAL MYSTERIES

Work by associate professor Claudia Haase sheds light on understanding emotions within relationships. 

Relationships are hotbeds of emotion, says Haase, a developmental psychologist. “Emotions don’t happen in a vacuum.  We feel them most strongly in relationship with others.”

Haase, who teaches the class Emotional Mysteries, is particularly interested in real-time interactions between two people —as they discuss a conflict in their relationship, things they enjoy doing together, or simply how their day went—to understand how emotions can transform relationships.

Over the years, she has studied marriages, friendships, and, more recently, parent-child relationships. Some of her findings point toward patterns. One study showed that people with a particular genetic variant were more likely to smile and laugh, suggesting that emotional reactivity may partly lie in a person’s DNA.

Another connected emotion to physical health after researchers found that angry outbursts can be tied to heart problems. Conversely, partners who stonewall—or shut down during conflict—have an increased risk of developing backaches or muscle tension.

On the other hand, her work has found that couples who experience mutual surges of warmth, humor, and affection enjoy better health prospects and live longer than counterparts who share fewer moments of “micro kindness,” according to a 2022 study she coauthored in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

More recent work has shown that people who can generate more joy and happiness may be buffered from the memory decline that happens with aging. “Emotions can move us, connect us, and drive human development,” Haase says.

“In school, we get lessons in so many different subjects, but we are rarely taught how to relate to each other, be vulnerable, and have difficult conversations.”

She considers it a privilege to study couples during their emotional journeys. Dating, she says, can be a time of very high highs and low lows. There is also an assumption of “almost a deadening in the emotional landscape” once people settle down.

In fact, her research has shown there are intense emotional changes throughout marriages because they are often our closest relationships and “they force us to really confront our deepest insecurities, needs, and wishes,” she says. The good news is that as we get older, “we tend to become sweeter with each other, less hostile and defensive. There’s a lot of change toward the better when we look at emotional changes in couples.”