Les and Leslie Parrott Tap into the Power of Technology to Support Healthy Relationships

Aug 9

Have the events of the past couple years left you feeling anxious? Worried about your marriage or your family? Maybe you have a relationship question, and you just don’t know where to turn.

These thoughts occurred to seasoned therapists and relationship experts Dr’s. Les and Leslie Parrott. Les and Leslie are a husband-and-wife team who share the same name and passion for helping others build healthy relationships. Les, a clinical psychologist and ordained Nazarene minister, is a professor of psychology at Northwest University. Leslie is a marriage and family therapist. They offer marriage and relationship help through their speaking engagements and their New York Times best selling books, with more than six million copies sold.

Married in 1984, the Parrotts began teaching at Seattle Pacific University in 1990. Soon after, they began a “Relationships 101” class that became the largest class on campus and an annual seminar for engaged couples which eventually became a book that has now been used by more than a million couples, Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts. That led them to coin the phrase “marriage mentoring” and begin training faculty and staff to walk alongside newlyweds (see MarriageMentoring.com). Their work caught national attention, and soon Les and Leslie found themselves guests on everything from Oprah and Barbara Walters to CBS This Morning and the Today Show as well as being interviewed by the New York Times and USA Today. “We never had pre-marriage counseling,” Les said. “But we spent the first year of our marriage in counseling,” adds Leslie. “That’s one of the reasons we are so passionate about helping couples successfully launch and enjoy lifelong love.”

Early in the 2020 lockdowns the concern for pandemic-related mental health issues resonated with the Parrotts. “It occurred to me on the very front end of COVID that we were going to see pretty significant fall-out in marriages as a result of what we were all going through. I wondered how to provide scalable help that was cost-effective,” Les said. While flipping through TV channels, an interview on one of the talk shows caught his eye. The guest appeared via Zoom – the first time Les had seen this on national TV. It was his “ah-ha” moment. He thought, “If there’s ever a time to capture some wisdom from experts in the relationship field – it’s now!”

The Parrotts began interviewing fellow relationship experts to capture three-minute answers to specific relationship questions. The result? A free treasure-trove of hundreds of practical, short-form videos. It’s called Loveology.org and was launched spring 2022. The site pulls together the world’s greatest experts in marriage, family and relationships so that anyone can find an answer to their private question in real time… and at no charge. A busy mom can get help with how to deal with her kids in the grocery line right there, Les explained.

Highly skilled, trained experts offer the wisdom needed at that moment. And if an individual doesn’t find what they are seeking, they can submit a question, and the Parrotts will find an answer from among their vast number of associates.

“This is a project that never ends,” Les said. “It’s ever changing, ever growing. We envision including hundreds, if not thousands, of experts from all kinds of relevant areas. Even last night, we fielded a question from someone wanting to know how to help a spouse who suffers from epilepsy. I have a friend who specializes in that. We’ll never run out of experts to address things.”

“The videos are very specific,” adds Leslie. “And I love the fact that it’s completely free. It’s kind of a legacy project for us.”

Currently, Loveology.org features more than 70 experts answering a broad range of searchable topics, with numbers continuing to grow. Viewers will find best practices and encouragement from people like Shaunti Feldhahn, Bobby Gruenewald, founder and CEO of YouVersion, Dr. Henry Cloud, Ron Deal, Dr. John Townsend, Yakov Smirnoff, Juli Slattery, Dr. Brad Wilcox, Dr. Alan Hawkins, Tim Kimmel, and Ted Cunningham —a veritable who’s who of leaders in the relationship realm.

Once the initial question is answered, Loveology.org, continues to be a resource. A seeker can click on the video featuring the expert answering their question of specific need, then follow up with the expert’s page to learn more about their work and how it might relate to them. The site was designed so information is easy to share.

“Let’s say you are highly motivated to get out of debt. You can watch the brief interview with Dave Ramsey, then click on his picture to link to his relevant resources. It’s a jumping off point to go deeper,” explains Leslie. “It’s enough to get you headed in the right direction, and we’ll serve up a series of brief interviews, by various experts, that pertain to your question.”

The site also provides a platform for newer voices to gain exposure. “We want to bring up other experts that maybe no one has heard about who have a real specialty with incredible value,” Les said. “We’ll help the younger ones find a foothold and an audience.”

Les records most of the videos with the experts, but sometimes Leslie joins him, which follows the format of their popular radio broadcasts and podcasts. “After working in this space for so many years we have a plethora of professionals who are at the ready. I don’t think we could have done this years ago – not just because of the lack of technology, but a pretty thin network. This timing is ideal for this tool,” Leslie said.

The site also includes a separate section specifically designed to empower marriage champions that offers counselors, coaches and pastors dozens and dozens of practical helps and guidance.

A marriage champion might need wisdom about work-life balance or how to handle a difficult topic like the death of a child. They’ll find information for their own use and ways to specifically encourage clients. For example, a pastor may have counseled someone with an eating disorder. He can find an expert’s video addressing what he talked about in the session and forward that link directly to the client with a personal note of encouragement.

Reaction has been incredibly positive, Les said. Loveolgy.org remains completely free to users thanks to generous donors and partners, who paid for the website’s creation and promotion.

The Parrotts hope companies and churches will point people to the site. K-Love Radio began publicizing it, and another private company of 500 employees encouraged every employee to watch just five minutes, Les said. “We have a lot of people on staff who are incredibly gifted and working at a wage that’s a gift. Everybody is in it because they believe in what we’re doing. We are committed to it for the long run.”

An intended consequence of Loveology.org — the videos preserve the wisdom of some of the field’s groundbreakers like Dr. Gary Chapman, and especially as they advance in years.

Les and Leslie realized several years ago as they interviewed Gary for a Valentine’s Day TV special that Gary had reached his 80s. His bestselling book, The 5 Love Languages, has become so ubiquitous and reaches across so many lines, the Parrotts realized “they had to do everything they could to bring this incredible content to the next generation.”

Accordingly, they launched a new assessment product in June 2022 called Better Love Featuring The 5 Love Languages. When their book, Saving Your Marriage Before it Starts, sold more than a million copies, the milestone inspired the Parrotts to conduct more research with pastors and counselors about how to reach people most effectively. They discovered marriage assessments were a practical, time efficient method to unravel the mysteries of a particular couple’s relationship. By definition, assessments provide an objective snapshot of a couple’s relationship that allows them to identify strengths and weaknesses, which can then help them build a path to a healthier future.

The Parrotts created the SYMBIS (Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts) Assessment, which generated an “incredibly positive response, bigger than ever anticipated,” Les said. “We didn’t know it would meet such a need and take off and bless so many people.”

“First published in 1995, and continually revised and updated, SYMBIS has become the gold standard in marriage preparation. Drs. Les & Leslie Parrotts’ award-winning approach incorporates twenty years of feedback, research, and professional experience. This is more than a book—it’s practically a self-guided premarital counseling course, and it is used by counselors and churches across North America and, now in twenty languages, worldwide,” according to the website.

“More than 1,000,000 couples and 100,000 pastors and counselors can't be wrong: SYMBIS is the most widely used pre-marriage system in existence.” Find it at SYMBIS.com. However, SYMBIS requires a facilitator to debrief a couple on their results, so it is best used in the context of a church or with a counselor. To meet the need to offer an assessment resource to a wider audience, the Parrotts created a version titled, BetterLove.com that could be self-administered and has components that allow for small groups and churches to participate on a larger scale – even entire congregations.

“This is a project that never ends,” Les said. “It’s ever changing, ever growing. We envision including hundreds, if not thousands, of experts from all kinds of relevant areas.

“Churches can have every couple in their care take the Better Love Assessment and not only does the couple receive the benefits of their personalized report, but the church leadership obtains a ‘state of marriage report’ specific to their church. It’s incredibly powerful information for a church to know,” Les said. “It can help them create an action plan of how to best serve their couples and families.”

“Assessments have become the point of the spear for us because we know they are the things that move the needle most for a couple,” Leslie said. “They deepen a couples’ self-awareness and capacity for empathy” Les added. “The results our assessments provide stand on a mountain of research – it’s not just armchair psychology.”

After a couple takes the Better Love Assessment — spending about 15 minutes answering a series of online questions — they’ll receive a customized roadmap for life-long love. And when Les says customized, he means customized. A highly sophisticated algorithm will generate more than 40,000 variables specific to a person depending on their responses to the questions. Then it matches those across the 40,000 variables of their partner’s response. The combination creates a fingerprint that makes the results unique to the couple.

The Valentine’s Day interview with Gary Chapman was the catalyst the Parrotts needed to incorporate his 5 Love Languages content into the Better Love Assessment, which greatly enhances the effectiveness and value of the takeaway report. The new part of the program applies the participants’ Love Languages to the results. Each couple’s report will look at the chemistry between the two of them to gauge how full their love tanks are in the relationship, Les explained. “This is something you can’t do by just reading a book – it’s only possible because of the technology!”

The Parrotts are such believers in the benefits of assessments they created another popular product that applies to singles titled, YADA.com. This is designed to help single adults better understand their motivations and personalities as well as their relational skill-sets before they make life decisions. In addition to self-reflection, YADA is useful in relationships other than those between romantic partners — several colleges and universities have incorporated it with curricula for incoming freshmen students to help them discover their relationship styles and serve as an introduction to others.

“The biggest reason students say they don’t return to a college is that it wasn’t a good fit, which usually means they didn’t find their people. YADA improves that while boosting a college’s retention level,” Les said.

The Parrotts believe technology will continue to refine the ways their work can help people with relationships in the future. “We have the opportunity to help couples in ways we never have before,” Les said. “Our big, overarching goal is to help churches lower the divorce rate by one-third in our lifetime. For every single percentage point we drop the divorce rate, the lives of more than a million children are positively impacted. That’s why we are dedicated to providing the best assessment tools possible to counselors, coaches, clergy and couples.”

Ready to give an assessment a try or interested in what the experts at Loveology.org might say about your situation? Find the Parrotts at LesAndLeslie.com.