What questions should I be asking myself during the commitment phase of a relationship?
Understood properly, the commitment phase is your last chance to really see what you getting. You know, you've moved away from this picture of the perfect person that you had during the second phase of idealization. And you gone through some reality and so you understand the ways in which you're not necessarily happy with them. But, now is the time you need to look at both, how you get along with each and other people. But, also how your personalities mesh. What components of theirs are really working for you? And, what components of your personality might be really working for them and which components are very troubling. One of the ways to do this is to ask a lot of questions both of yourself and of them, certainly by investigating their past and your own. If you can get some idea of how they were raised, and, more importantly, how their previous relationships went, you will have a very good indication of how your relationship with them might go. And if ultimately you find out that you going to have to do a pretty significant amount of changing for the relationship to work out, chances are pretty good you should walk away and walk away quick because the reality is once we at a certain age change is hard.