John Van Epp, PhD is the author of How to Avoid Falling in Love with a Jerk, published by McGraw-Hill and Christianity Today’s Top Pick for Singles; Becoming Better Together: The RAM plan for growing together when life is pulling you apart; and Endgame: The Church’s Strategic Move to Save Faith and Family in America.

A Personal History

Shirley and I met when we were attending a private college in downtown Philadelphia in 1977. We spent countless hours  talking and growing together during the next two years and married in the summer of 1979. I graduated with a B.S. in Biblical and Pastoral Studies and was honored to be selected to be the lead pastor in a church plant in northern Ohio. What a wonderful way to begin our marriage! During those very active seven years, Shirley gave birth to our two daughters, the church grew to be able to purchase and renovate a permanent campus, and I earned two Masters degrees from seminary: one in Pastoral Psychology and another in Church History.

That season of life came to a close when I felt called to full-time counseling and entered into a Ph.D. program in Psychology. I left the pastorate to become a counselor and for the next 30 years, I engaged in a private practice in northern Ohio. It was early in my doctoral program that I developed a practical and visual interactive model—the Relationship Attachment Model (RAM)– which captures five universal bonds that exist in all relationships. I used it regularly in my counseling with clients who seemed to instantly understand their relationships with greater clarity and intentionality.

In latter half of the 1990’s, I was teaching Marriage and Family Advanced Studies in a graduate program in addition to my counseling practice and had become convinced that many of the struggles that brought clients into counseling were actually preventable. This led me to develop instructor-led relationship courses within a Biblical framework that integrated the research and theory I had gleaned from the psycho-social sciences along with the counseling interventions and skills which had definitely improved clients. These courses, organized around the RAM, included an intentional dating course for youth, emerging adults, and singles-again (PICK), a course for committed and married couples (Couple LINKS), and a set of family and parenting courses (Our Home Runs). 

By 2010, I had closed my practice and was providing certification trainings in my courses to relationship educators in the military, churches, secondary and post-secondary educational settings, social agencies, community marriage and fatherhood non-profits, incarceration facilities, and counseling practices. A couple of years later, our oldest daughter, Morgan, graduated with her Ph.D. in Psychology and joined me full time in our organization, Love Thinks, LLC. In 2015, we expanded the instructor-led model of our flagship courses by developing two additional versions: 1) an online version with workbooks for at-home users (www.MyLoveThinks.com); and 2) the RAM series for churches (www.RAMseries.com).

Dr. Morgan Cutlip has also multiplied the reach of Love Thinks with her amazing relationship content on social media (Instagram), while both of us have had the privilege of writing books and providing keynotes, seminars, retreats, and workshops all around the world. Shirley and I thank God for this remarkable and undeserving journey of providing so many with support in their most significant relationships. But our deepest gratitude is for our 45 years together in marriage, and that we get to live in the same town as both of our daughters, their husbands, and our five grandkids.

Brief Bio

The combination of his twenty-five years of providing clinical therapy in a private practice with his experience as an adjunct professor where he taught marriage and family coursework and reviewed extensive research in premarital, marital and family relations, have paved the way for his Love Thinks programs, PICK (How to Avoid Falling for a Jerk), Couple LINKS, Our Home Runs, Home Run Dads, Home Run Parents, R&R (Ready & Resilient) for the Fight Spiritual Fitness Training, and Relationship Counseling/Coaching with the RAM to be taught to more than a million people worldwide, and to be used by all branches of the military, non-profit and community organizations, high schools and universities, social agencies, juvenile and correctional facilities, churches and faith-based organizations, and in all fifty states, ten countries and by more than 35,000 instructors certified by Dr. Van Epp. These Love Thinks programs come in three formats: certification courses for instructor-led classes, plug-n-play discussion group courses, and online courses for at-home learning—all having both Christian and community (or non-religious) versions.

Van Epp has been a contractor for the Henry Jackson Foundation and worked with the staff at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in the Laboratory of Suicidality Department. He is considered a subject matter expert (SME) on spirituality, psychology, resiliency, and suicidality, and has contributed to the development of a suicide prevention, intervention, and postvention manual for Chaplains with Special Operations.

Dr. Van Epp and his relationship programs which are based around his innovative Relationship Attachment Model were awarded the Smart Marriage Impact Award in 2008, the Impact Award in 2018 from the National Alliance of Relationship and Marriage Education, and have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Psychology Today, O-Magazine, and Cosmopolitan; and he has appeared on the CBS Early Show, Good Morning America, Fox News, and Focus on the Family.

Education

He has presented his programs internationally in seminars and conferences, including the Smart Marriages Conference of the Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education from 1998-2010, the National Alliance of Relationship and Marriage Education from 2011-2023, Singapore’s National Conference on Truth and Relationships, the Eastern Educational Research Association, International and Chapter Conferences for the North American Association for Separated and Divorced Catholics, the Annual Conference of the Ohio Association for Family and Consumer Sciences, the National and International Conferences for Beginning Experience, and the Ohio Christian Education Association, to name a few. His Love Thinks courses are research-informed and evidence-based courses with an instructor course with published research from peer-reviewed journals validating the effectiveness of the positive impact on individuals, couples, and relationships.

He has an M.A. in Pastoral Counseling and Psychology, and a second M.A. in Church History from Ashland Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. in Counseling and Psychology from the University of Akron.

He has been happily married for over forty-four years and is the proud father of two daughters and four grandkids (soon to be five).  Check out Love Thinks other two websites: www.MyLoveThinks.com (for at-home resources) and www.RAMseries.com (for churches).

You can contact John at info@lovethinks.tahseenabbasi.com.

Professional Vita