Compare & Contrast Critique: Developing Healthy Romantic Relationships

Running Head: Compare & Contrast Critique: Developing Healthy Romantic Relationships        

Robert Stewart

Saint Leo University - PSY 110HA-AT25

Professor Susan Gates-Ennett

(Wednesday) July 13, 2016

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to provide comparisons and contrasts of two separate authorities advising the American public at large on developing healthy romantic relationships. This is accomplished through critiques of popular and professional psychology resources relied upon in by our culture. This paper explores the contents of three published articles.  Two of the articles, For the Men: Four Behaviors for Men that Kill Your Chance of Having Healthy Relationship and For the Ladies: Four Behaviors For Women that Kill Your Chance of Having a Healthy Relationship are sourced from columns written by a relationship expert from a popular magazine that, demographically, primarily services African-Americans. The author offers no supporting research or data to support her position. Yet, many readers subscribe to the advice provided.  The third article, Happy Couples: How to Keep Your Relationship Healthy is written and sourced by Psychologists Robin S. Haight, PsyD, and Dan Abrahamson, PhD., fully researched and published by the American Psychological Association.  It offers empirical based information to assist with building and maintaining a healthy romantic relationship that is extrinsic of being based totally on personal opinion, experiences or simply being qualified as valid because the writer is a popular published author or mainstream personality.  This critique follows and provides pros and cons from the perspective of what we could consider when utilizing popular and professional psychology based information when formulating our future actions to develop and maintain healthy romantic relationships.

Romantic Relationship Advice Based on Popular Self-Proclaimed Psychologist

The author, Sil Lai Abrams is a NABJ award-winning New York City based writer, inspirational speaker, and domestic violence awareness activist with a passionate belief in advising her audience to use the transformative power of greater self-awareness and personal accountability as the motivation to empower others to create empowered lives, healthier relationships and end violence against women and children. Ms. Abrams was the victim of domestic violence inflicted upon her by her boyfriend for multiple years.  She eventually escaped her traumatic ordeal and has developed a stellar career assisting others.  She has appeared on multiple major networks and has been featured and or contributed to many national magazines. Her inspirational life story has led her to offering relationship advice as an author, public speaker, workshop facilitator, relationship columnist and founder of a non-profit organization assisting individuals who are victims of domestic violence.  

For The Ladies and the Men Popular Relationship Advice

        Though Abrams’ accomplishments are impressive and inspiring her resume offers no qualifications as an authority for psychological advice or instruction to either gender in the area of finding, forming and maintaining healthy personal relationships.  Her Ebony Magazine Article, For the Ladies: Four Behaviors For Women that Kill Your Chance of Having a Healthy Relationship, purports to provide African–American Women with—as she states “We Sisters make.”  

        Abrams states that African-American women are 1)Too Available, Having Sex When He Wants, 2)Not When You Are Ready, 3)Always Being the initiator in the relationship and 4)Failure to Speak Up are the four common mistakes that all African–American women make in forming and maintaining healthy relationships.  She offers no empirical data to support her position and goes even further to state:

“And while some of us have very real emotional issues that prevent us from successfully partnering, from what I’ve seen, many of the problems women face in their relationships with men come from the way we position ourselves in the beginning.”

        In her companion article, For the Men: Four Behaviors for Men that Kill Your Chance of Having Healthy Relationship, Abrams lists the four top that common mistakes in relationships African-American men make that ruin their opportunities to find “true love”. She lists 1)Failure to plan in advance, 2)Keeping your relationship status a secret, 3)Having undefined sex as quickly as possible, and 4)Only knowing one strategy – defense.  She again assumes that all African-American men are encountering these issues and commit the acts she proclaims to be mistakes.  As a self-proclaimed  psychological authority Abrams states: