Finding the path to a lasting relationship

The ability to select a suitable partner comes with age and maturity, insist Joyce Gioia and Roger Herman, who were both married twice before finding each other.

"Societal expectations push people to marry when they are totally ignorant as to what it's all about," says Ms. Gioia. "All my friends were already married at 24. In the '60s, if you weren't married by then, you were an old maid." So she followed suit, only to discover she had chosen the wrong one. And then another wrong one.

But with Roger, she scored. "Three is definitely a charm," they say almost in unison during a three-way conference call. "We were developed enough as individuals when we met that we both knew what we wanted," he says.

To which she adds: "Within two hours, we were finishing each other's sentences. I had more of a 'knowing' sense with him than with the others."

They are not only life partners but also business partners. As founders of the Herman Group, a management consulting firm that forecasts trends, they share the same podium at national speaking engagements and the same conference table at corporate meetings. One social trend they predict is that since people are marrying later in life, when they are more in touch with themselves, the national divorce rate will plummet.

Also becoming more socially acceptable is the tendency to seek out professional help before marriage. Premarital counseling has made recent news headlines, since President Bush announced last winter that his administration hopes to spend $300 million to foster marriage among welfare recipients because social science shows that marriage is good for children. A series of experimental programs to provide counseling before heading for the altar is a key part of this initiative.

But clearly, welfare clients aren't the only people who could benefit from such help.

During his frequent premarital-counseling sessions, Warren tries to assess a couple's compatibility in those 29 different areas. "If they aren't well-matched, I tell them exactly that," he says. "It might sound brutal, and they usually don't want to be talked out of marriage, but I don't want them to fall into that huge pit of people for whom marriage doesn't work out."

For some people, gauging compatibility on more than a few fronts might seem like a pretty daunting task.

Corey Donaldson ascribes to a different strategy for finding the love of your life: asking questions – lots of them. After interviews with 1,500 people who've had varying success with marriage or dating in their lives, he compiled a list of about 500 questions that he believes can identify divorce-causing issues. They range from "If we are unable to have children, should we adopt?" to "Does it matter to you who earns most of the money?" and "How would you rank all of the priorities in your life: work, school, family, spouse, friends, hobbies, and church?"

It was his desire to succeed at marriage, after a three-year, long-distance relationship, that was the catalyst for this project. It has since become a personal crusade and landed him an offer from Random House to write down his findings. From the home he and his wife share in Ogden, Utah, he wrote "Don't You Dare Get Married Until You Read This!"

"We ask questions at every juncture of our lives," he says, "and marriage is the most important."

So why do people fail to ask the key questions? "They don't know the questions they should be asking," he says. "And they fear disruption of the fantasy of romance, so they avoid areas of potential conflict."

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