Just as we instruct young people to wash their hands to avoid the flu, we can help more teens avoid dating violence by teaching them to get smart about their love lives.

We can all agree that young people need to learn how to spot and improve unhealthy relationships and to extract themselves from dangerous ones. We have, however, overlooked a huge opportunity for reducing dating violence even further. We must change the focus to primary prevention...avoiding dating violence before it begins.

Think about this. What if we taught teens, as early as middle school and certainly in high school, what a healthy romantic relationship looks like? How to really get to know someone, not only by spending time with them but also by observing their behavior with others? What the foundational ingredients of good relationships are? How to develop high standards for how they want to be treated by a romantic partner (and how to treat others with that same level of respect and empathy)? What if they learned more about what real intimacy is and how it develops, and about the benefits of pacing their relationship involvement more slowly? Finally, how to break up respectfully?

What would that world look like? I think it would look like a world with less dating violence.

And I'm not just dreaming. Multiple evaluations of The Dibble Institute's relationship skills programs indicate that when young people learn these life skills, their incidence of dating violence decreases, as does their aggression (both verbal and physical) toward their peers.

To avoid the flu, we get vaccinated and we sneeze into our elbows. To avoid dating violence, we can start teaching young people not only what to say "no" to, but, more importantly, what to say "yes" to. We can teach them the skills they need for healthy romantic relationships, now and in the future.

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Kay Reed is Executive Director of The Dibble Institute for Marriage Education, an organization dedicated to helping young people learn the skills necessary for successful relationships and marriages. This piece was written in observation of Teen Dating Violence Awareness and Prevention Month, which began today, February 1.