Relationships Gone Wrong: The Red Flags :

Twenty-six-year-old pop star Britney Spears and former backup dancer Kevin Federline recently finalized their divorce. While most of us may not be shocked by the split, we can all learn a thing or two from them about what never to do in a relationship.

How to Avoid Marrying a Jerk author and relationship expert John Vann Epp, PhD, dissects the highly publicized relationship and sheds light on how to read the warning flags that they ignored.

Dr. Vann Epp has made it his mission to learn everything there is about jerks to inform the rest of the world of the best ways to avoid them. There couldn’t be a better exemplifier of what can happen if a jerk stays in your life than Britney and Kevin’s imprudent relationship.

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Van Epp’s technique of picking out the warning signs way in advance is made up of five key areas, Know, Trust, Rely, Commit and Touch, all of which are well backed up by research.

“Those five areas are extremely important in a relationship. They describe the dynamics of love,” he says. "There is a logical order to those areas and it can be expressed in a simple guideline, which says don’t let one level exceed the previous. In a relationship your heart becomes very vulnerable when your trust level becomes way higher than how well you know somebody. Rather than getting to know each other in any kind of a fashion, Britney and Kevin jumped right into a highly sexual relationship.”

When it comes to being crowned jerk, both Spears and Federline deserve the honor of wearing the crown. Each of them had many unresolved issues they brought into the relationship, which is the best way to ensure an unhappy ending, Van Epps said.

Red Flag Warning for Britney:
“Kevin was already in a relationship with a partner who had a child of his and was seven months pregnant. From Britney’s standpoint, she just completely denied the fact that track records tend to repeat themselves. If he was able to break any kind of sense of responsibility to go with her, she should have stopped to consider that he might break his allegiance with her to go with somebody else.”

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