Marry a Friend: Finding Someone to Marry Who Is Truly Right for You

The hope of finding someone wonderful to marry is the most intense dream most of us ever experience. Yet the challenge seems impossibly great for so many of us. In this compassionate and deeply practical book, Blaine Smith offers a mountain of advice and encouragement to those at their wits end searching for a spouse. Drawing on decades of experience teaching and counseling singles, he provides multiple strategies for finding a marriage partner, including many you haven't likely thought of before. Smith writes with a heart for the special issues Christians face in looking for marriage. Yet anyone will find benefit in his insights and practical advice.

Smith also looks closely at expectations, and how they can help or quickly defeat us in our search for a mate. Friendship, he stresses, much more than romance, is at the heart of a blissful, healthy, enduring marriage. Grasping this time-honored principle can simplify our marriage quest, sometimes greatly, for we recognize possibilities we haven’t considered. Smith looks carefully at what sort of friendship works best for marriage, and at what role romance and sexual attraction should, in fact, play.

Other topics include —

• Embracing the desire for marriage
• Why your prospects of finding someone are good — regardless of age
• Rebounding from rejection
• Why you probably don't have “the gift of singleness”
• God’s guidance in your marriage quest
• Recognizing opportunities you already have
• Getting others’ help in finding someone to marry
• Changes — major and minor — that can help you
• The best places for meeting someone
• Dating and launching a serious relationship
• Using Internet matching services effectively
• Taking initiative effectively as woman
• Making every day count

M. Blaine Smith, a Presbyterian pastor, is author of nine books, including The Yes Anxiety, Overcoming Shyness, and the best-selling Should I Get Married?. He is director of Nehemiah Ministries in Washington, D.C.