Another pitfall is inflexibility. The likelihood of finding someone who you like, respect, want to allege to, being exactly like you in background, in beliefs and in ideals, is not that great. You have to ask yourself whether your inner expectation is always that the other person change, or whether you yourself have some capacity to be flexible. You have to ask yourself, to you does flexibility mean defeat or does flexibility mean giving? If to you, every time you have to extend yourself towards the other person, what you’re experiencing is defeat, then you’d better marry someone who is very similar indeed, almost your twin. Conversely, if you’re the kind of person who, when you look honestly at your track record could say — I take pleasure in giving — you could be less afraid.

Many couples seem to go out for a while, even for months or years, and they never get to the stage of proposal and marriage. How do you explain this apparent roadblock in a relationship? The hesitance to take the plunge. How do you deal with that?

People sometimes get stuck when dating. They meet each other once, twice, three times. They know each other well enough to know that there might be a possibility of marriage, but they don’t feel strongly enough about each other to actually want to commit towards deepening the relationship. Classically there are two responses. One response is to go into a physical relationship. This is self-defeating. All it does is put physical pleasure into a picture in which real un-clarity is one of emotional commitment. This makes making a decision harder, not easier. More likely to be the wrong decision, not less. This is born out by statistics in which it’s demonstrated that a couple who live together before marriage is more likely to divorce than a couple that didn’t. And a couple that lived together for a long time is more likely to divorce than a couple that lived together for a short time. The reason for that is that the emotional commitment to the marriage never developed.

Another pitfall is not being able to be open emotionally out of fear. Sometimes we’ve been hurt. Sometimes the hurt is still there. So sometimes you have two good people, people who are worthy of love and respect, unable to be emotionally open with each other. Each one wants the other one to be the one to open up first. They’re afraid of rejection, afraid of unnecessary vulnerability. When that’s the case, opening up slowly is the key. When you need the other person to open up to you, you have to first begin by talking about yourself, asking them what they think, what they feel, whether they’ve experienced similar situations in their own lives. At this point, a third person could be of enormous