COMPARISON SHOPPING

Rebecca, thirty-nine, a journalist who got married last year, recalls a moment when she found another woman's phone number jumbled among her banker boyfriend's business cards.

"I called the number, and asked the bitch point-blank what was up," Rebecca said. Sure enough, the woman revealed that Rebecca's boyfriend had asked her out to dinner. "I hit the roof. I didn't scream at her, but I became hke something out of one of those nighttime soap operas. I actually told her to keep her hands off and not to call him again. She said, 'You've got a great one there, you should be nice to him. I said, 'Well, if he's so great, how come he called you when he's living with me?

"Then I called him. He had the nerve to be livid with me for 'interfering in his private business. I said, 'Get one thing straight, buddy. When you're going out with me, there is no private business. Still, for about two days afterward, I thought we were finished. Then

we got over it, and he asked me to marry him about three months later."

There are other methods. After Lisa had been seeing her future husband, Robert, for two months, he started to get squirmy.

"What do you think if I go out with other people?" he asked.

"I think you should do comparison shopping," Lisa said, supercoolly. "How else can you possibly appreciate me? I'm not a jailer."

That really blew him away.

"It's all about self-esteem," Lisa said. "Men have to feel that there are limits and you're not going to take anything."

One well-known problem is living with a guy before you're married, and then he doesn't do anything about asking you to marry him. This can be taken care of with dispatch. "Just heard a story," said Trudie. "Woman, living with guy for a year. One morning, she wakes up. 'Are we going to get married? Guy says no. She says, 'Move out right now. He asks her to marry him that weekend."

"One of the biggest mistakes women make is that they don't discuss marriage from the beginning," said Lisa.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 911