Practice reading the following dialogue in pairs, working at your pronunciation and expression. Learn it by heart and perform it with a partner in front of the class

A: - I wonder how long it normally takes to let the wall break down in love relations?

B: - It depends actually. I think if one is really starved for love, it won’t take too long. And what do you think?

A: - I don’t know. I thought perhaps it depends on their capacity to love and on whether they found the right object to love…or the intensity of infatuation.

B. - I agree. Those are important too.

A: - And why, do you think, the tremendous hopes and expectations of people in love are so often killed pretty soon?

B: - Well, you know, most people are in search of romantic love and it’s not a lasting type.

A: - And marriage? You don’t think that romantic love will lead to marriage, do you?

B: - Why? It sometimes does. But most often you have to overcome a few failures of love before concluding a marriage.

A: - So what will you advise? No romance?

B: -On the contrary. Only my personal experience of love has made me a little …

A: - Wiser?

B: - That’s it.

A: - I see. Thanks.

The expressions below show the ways of checking understanding. Working with a partner act out a dialogue of your own to discuss any issue from E. Fromm’s essay at your choice and use all the following expressions and the topical vocabulary.

What I can’t make out is why…

Why on earth should I…?

Isn’t it obvious /evident/clear?

Why is that… when in fact…?

Do you/Are you/Have you?

Can’t you see/Don’t you see?

You sound as if you…

How does it go?

Do you really mean it?

Read two texts below and discuss them with a partner to find out which of them is about marriage in Britain and which about marriage in the USA. Retell the texts.

1. Many single people in _____ have trouble finding a marriage partner. In the past, sometimes friends would help by becoming matchmakers. They would introduce a man and a woman, and sometimes the man and woman would fall in love and get married.

But today, many people pay companies called dating services to help them find partners. And even if the dating service does not always find them someone to marry, it at least finds them someone to date.

Getting married has changed in some ways. In the past, the man proposed to the woman. But now sometimes the woman asks the man to marry her. After the couple decides to marry, the man gives the woman a ring. She wears it on her left hand to show that they are engaged. Sometimes the man and woman elope. When they run away and get married privately, their parents are often disappointed because they like big weddings.

When married both newlyweds often work because they need two paychecks to pay their bills. But sometimes they still have money problems. And sometimes they find that they just aren’t compatible. So for many people, marriage ends in divorce. Yet, some people stay together long enough to celebrate their fiftieth or seventy-fifth wedding anniversary.

2.Young people in ______ may have several girlfriends or boyfriends from their teens onwards. They go to the cinema, go dancing, play sports or eat out together and do not necessarily intend to get married. However, each year about 350,000 couples become husband and wife. Marriage is legal from the age of sixteen but most people wait until their mid to late twenties. Of those who get married, about seventy per cent prefer a traditional church wedding to a registry office wedding. However, by the age of forty, one woman in twenty and one man in eleven will still be single.

One in four children are born outside of marriage but these are not all in single-parent families; sixty per cent of unmarried parents have stable relationships. Thirty-seven per cent of marriages end in divorce and cost the country dear. Although over thirty per cent of women depend financially on their husbands, women ask for seventy per cent of all divorces. Three out of ten divorced women married as teenagers.

Marriage does seem to be more popular now than could be imagined thirty years ago. Is it since research has shown that married people generally live longer than the single?

Listen to a story by O. Henry. Discuss it in groups of 3-4 until you are ready to sum up its message. Guess its title.

Below there are two short stories about love at first sight. Working in pairs, get prepared to explain how their messages are related to that of E. Fromm’s essay. Picking up from both stories, enlarge the list of your topical vocabulary and use as many units from it as possible in the discussion.

1. The first time Michael saw Helen, he fell in love with her. It was love at first sight. The problem was how to win her love for him. First he tried to impress her. He asked her to fly to Cannes with him for the Film Festival. She refused. Then he asked her to come to Rome with him. But she said no. ‘Perhaps she likes the simple life,” he thought. So he asked her to spend a weekend with him in the country. She refused that too. “Food. I’ll try food”, he thought and asked her to eat with him at Mason’s, one of the best restaurants in London.

“No, thank you,” she said and lowered her lovely blue eyes, “She is so beautiful,” he thought. “I will try one last question”. And he asked her to marry him.

“Yes,” she said. “I will. Mason’s, Rome, Cannes, the country – what an exciting life we will have’.

2. It was love at first sight. I saw her standing on the other side of a crowded room sipping a glass of wine. Our eyes met. I walked over to her and said, “You seem to be on your own. Can I join you?”

She smiled and said yes. At first she came across as rather shy, but as I got to know her better I found out that she was an open and confident person who was easy to get on with. At the end of the party I said I would like to see her again and asked her out for a meal the following week.

I took her out to a small Italian restaurant in Soho. After talking for a while, we found out that we had a lot in common in fact, we seemed to have the same interests and tastes in everything. She smiled at me when I spoke to her, and when our eyes met this time I knew that I was head over years in love with her. I thought that she was falling in love with me too. We started going out with each other, and after some time we got engaged and decided to live together. We were both very happy and made plans to settle down and get married the following year.

However, it wasn’t long before things started to go wrong. She seemed less affectionate and loving as the weeks passed, and I started to feel she was going off me. She criticized me all the time. “Why are you always going on at me?” I asked.

In the end I wondered if we were suited to one another. I was keen on hard rock and she was fond of classical music. I was interested in sport and she was interested in politics. We finally fell out over a TV Programme. We had a terrible row, broke off our engagement, and called off the wedding. A week later she moved out. I was heartbroken, and it took me a long time to get over it.

A few months later I heard she was engaged to a man who worked in local government. They got married, but after two years, their marriage broke up and they got divorced.

I tell you this because last night I went to a party and I was drowning my sorrows when I saw her standing on the other side of the room sipping a glass of wine. I saw a man walk over to her and I heard him say. “You seem to be on your own. Can I join you?”.