How did you go from a recent grad at UW-Madison to the accomplished professor and author you are today?
In and around the greater metropolitan area of Detroit, I have a private practice, teach university students, and direct a landmark government-funded, long-term research study of marriage. But outside of my counseling office and the ivory towers of the two Michigan universities where I work—Oakland University and University of Michigan—
I am known as “The Love Doctor®.”
But that wasn’t something I set out to do. Initially, my dream was to be a clinical psychologist. In my senior year of college at UW-Madison, I even applied and was accepted to two clinical psychology programs. But then, in April of that senior year, I happened to talk to a sociology professor who inspired me to rethink my dreams and goals. It wasn’t planned at all, I just happened to sit down with the professor.
After several meetings with the sociology professor, who said I sounded like a social psychologist in sociology (I had no idea what that meant at that time), I decided to stay in Madison and get my MA and Ph.D. in social psychology in Sociology. During graduate school at UW, I enjoyed teaching undergraduate students, doing research, and interning as a counselor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Counseling Center. I recognized early on that teaching and counseling would always be a part of my future career.
Can you describe your job as "The Love Doctor" and how you got into it?
After receiving my Ph.D. in 1988, I accepted a postdoctoral fellowship in psychology at the University of Iowa. I spent two years there doing research on relationships, specifically how individuals cope and adjust to changes in their relationships, or to stressful events in their lives. While at the University of Iowa, I recognized I also really enjoyed examining relationships from a scientific perspective, particularly which factors keep people together and happy in their relationships, and which factors lead to unhappiness or break relationships apart.
After Iowa, I accepted a job at the University of Michigan, and then Oakland University. I became the research director of a long-term project on marriage and divorce, funded by the National Institutes of Health. The project has been following the same 373 couples - all who got married in 1986 - for the past 24 years now. I also got married and had two wonderful children.
Why does someone from the world of academia put herself out there in the national media as “The Love Doctor?” It’s because I had an epiphany a few years ago while pouring through fascinating data on marriage and reading the latest findings in relationship research. It was this: very few of the people who can really use great information about marriage and relationships ever get to see, learn about, and benefit from the findings of my research and that of other relationship scientists. That’s because most of the really good relationship research only gets published in academic journals and papers, which are not accessible to the general public without a subscription or university affiliation.
So I became a new kind of academician - a professor, researcher, and therapist - but one who brings science to real couples in the form of highly practical tips and easy-to-understand approaches. As “The Love Doctor,” I became a nationally recognized relationship adviser who is on television and radio, in print, and online. I make science accessible, understandable, and helpful to the general public. I have a reputation of being optimistic and nonjudgmental, and people say they love my concrete, helpful tips that they can apply right away to make their relationships healthier and more fulfilling. I listen to questions about love, dating, sex, marriage, and all kinds of relationships, and then offer advice that’s upbeat, easy to use, and based on science.