If you're ready to end the dating phase of your life forever by

finding your lifelong love, you're ready for: SpeedDating

With SpeedDating, a comprehensive dating guide, you'll speed through the dating phase of your life into a committed, lifelong relationship, avoiding go-nowhere entanglements and other dating pitfalls.

The dating-world myth that evaluating a relationship takes months and months -- or worse, years and years -- causes unnecessary emotional complications, heartache, and time spent in dead-end relationships. With this book in hand, you'll know before you invest your heart whether a relationship has a future. And when you fall in love, SpeedDating will help you determine if that love can last a lifetime. The SpeedDating process helps you find your lifelong love -- not a fleeting romance that leaves you back where you began -- single. SpeedDaters save the romance for the right relationship.

SpeedDating is best known for its fast, fun, 7-minute round-robin dating events, which have been featured in major media such as the New York Times and People. But the SpeedDating approach shared in this book takes you beyond the first date to help you reach your goal: marriage in the quickest possible time to a person you love who will cherish the real you forever.

Whether you're new to the dating scene, a veteran, or just returning, SpeedDating will put you on the fast track to a healthy, committed, lifelong relationship.

Each question in Part 1 explains a key dating principle that will help you date more effectively. This section clarifies some common misperceptions about dating and enables you to better understand the type of person with whom you will be able to form a lifelong relationship.

Since knowledge only becomes wisdom when it is applied, we've provided an exercise at the end of some of the questions. By taking a few minutes to complete each exercise, you will begin the process of applying the SpeedDating principles and making them your own.

Let's begin!

The first step to SpeedDating is consciously committing to finding a lifelong, meaningful relationship -- and not settling for less. If you ask many people if they're thinking of a long-term commitment with the person they're dating, they'll say, “No, no, we're just dating.” You meet them three years later, and they're saying the same thing. For the SpeedDating process to work, dating must be seen as a vehicle for achieving a long-lasting, committed relationship.

But couldn't we assume that almost anyone reading this book is looking for a meaningful, lasting relationship? Certainly, yes. Yet you may be dating in ways that have little chance of success. You may be falling victim to relationships that seem headed in the right direction, but in fact are not. We like to say that these relationships craft half of a lifelong relationship -- the long part! These long-term faux relationships are common time-wasters and heartbreakers because they typically last eight months to three years, but never hold the potential for lifelong commitment.

Let's examine a few such scenarios to help identify and avoid them in the future.

The Shaper

Shapers try to change the person they're dating into someone he is not in order to make the relationship work. When Shapers encounter a deal-breaker situation in a relationship, they believe that if just given enough time and persuasion, the other person will change.

Jane is a classic Shaper. When we met Jane, she was dating John. Jane admired John's intelligence, sense of humor, and strong work ethic. She believed they were perfect for each other. There was just one problem -- John's consuming passion for sports car racing. When he wasn't working, John spent the majority of his time devoted to his hobby -- either at the racetrack or at home working on one of his many cars. Jane disliked everything about this hobby. Cars didn't interest her, and she especially hated going to the track, where her emotions ranged from bored to terrified.

She figured that John would outgrow this hobby someday. She certainly couldn't imagine marrying someone who spent his life devoted to car racing. She bought John a tennis racket and lessons at the local health club. When he didn't develop an interest in tennis, she bought them both mountain bikes and would regularly suggest that they go for bike rides. For over eighteen months Jane tried to pull John away from his passion, with no success. Instead of recognizing and dealing with this deal-breaker situation, Jane continued to try to change reality.

There's nothing wrong with exposing a potential partner to areas of your life to see if he too will be interested, but it's unhealthy and unrealistic to try to mold a person into something he is not.

Had Jane been SpeedDating, she would have handled the situation differently. When she discovered that John, as wonderful as he was, was essentially married to a hobby she despised, she would first look within herself to see if in fact it was a deal breaker. If it was, she would have explored for a limited time the possibility that he...

Yaacov Deyo is a graduate of Harvard, where he studied physics and Nicaraguan land reform. On a grant from Harvard, he was involved in conflict resolution in Belfast, Ireland. Returning home, he ran a homeless shelter in Boston. In 1996 he was ordained as a rabbi after seven years of advanced study at the Aish HaTorah Yeshiva. Yaacov and his students created SpeedDating events to help Los Angeles Jewish singles meet each other. Within a year, SpeedDating expanded to more than twenty-five cities worldwide and was featured in major media, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, People, the View, the Early Morning Show on CBS, NPR, and more. Currently Yaacov runs SpeedDating Worldwide, lectures on SpeedDating principles, and is the educational director of Aish Los Angeles, one of the largest Jewish education centers in the country.Sue Deyo, a graduate of Stanford University, is a dating coach and often teaches the SpeedDating approach to dating. The Deyos live in Los Angeles, California.