How not to get cold feet

Picture yourself looking into a mirror you are staring at yourself in a beautiful white dress, your hair is done perfectly, and you are simply glowing you turn around and show your dad, and you laugh and cry together because today is the day you go from Miss to Mrs, your dad is having a hard time letting it all happen, but as you tell him you love him he trusts that you have picked the right person to spend the rest of your life with. How did you make that decision? It is my hope that you would have gotten to know that person well enough to know how they will react and interact with you and others. When do see how they react, we see this with time while we are dating. Dating is a word that seems a little bit outdated and old fashion nowadays. If we date we have a better chance of really understanding someone, even though that is not fully a guarantee but it does help our chances the longer and more experiences we have with someone that we will be able to find out everything we need to know about that person. A lot of today's culture is full of hanging out, and people think that they know someone because they hangout all of the time, or there is the other belief that if people live together for two years before getting married that they will have a marriage that will last forever. How realistic are these two beliefs, or how successful are they really?
Let us start with the very beginning, you have to notice someone. The science of attraction is very curious, what is it about a person that just makes you want them to be large part of your life. Well there is some actually science behind this,  the first thing that we do when we meet people is we put them through filters, and if they pass all the filters then we consider them for dating. On of the filters that we see typically at the beginning of the filters is Propinquity which means nearness in place. We tend to associate with those who are in our surrounding because that is what is comfortable to us, we automatically have common ground with that person, that we can build off of. Another filter that is close to the beginning is Appearance we use this filter as one from a distance, or more commonly known as a first impression, we as humans draw conclusions and generalize others based on the way they look and the way that they hold themselves.
Once we have put people through our filters we need to get to know them, John van epp is an american author that wrote the book " how to avoid falling in love with a jerk" In this book he suggests a form of dating to help us truly know someone, he suggests Together, Talk and Time are the three most important things you can do for a relationship. Togetherness is not the act of saying "yea we are together she is my girlfriend" Togetherness is the number and variety of activities that we have been apart of together. Talk is not something that you let one person do and then the other person sits back and nods their head saying yes to everything, when talking there needs to be a mutual self disclosure where both partners are open hearted, feelings and thoughts can be openly discussed. And the last one is time, Van epp suggested that it takes a minimum of three months to know someone, because you can see them in a variety of situations by that time. The dates that we go on with our significant other can be the most finical

thing for the relationship, and so i challenge us to strive to take the time to go on an actual date, a date that is planned, paid for, paired off. And just go have fun with it.