My friend Delia Jordan held out for a long time before tying the marital knot, determined to avoid the problems with money and alcohol that plagued her parents' marriage.

The guy she finally picked out gave every appearance of being an up-and-coming yuppie lawyer. But not very long after he and Delia said, "I do," the straight-arrow lawyer turned out to have a major problem with billing his clients; he also had a drinking problem. Delia told me, "It's like you marry this person and then he peels off his mask and says, `Surprise! It's Dad!' "

Many women, like Delia, find marriage to be the biggest emotional challenge they'll ever face.

With all the therapy we've had, and self-awareness in our culture at an all-time high, why do we persist in trying to make over our mates?

Psychologist and author Daphne Rose Kingma explains why we marry the wrong person for the right reasons. We often choose mates who allow us to go through the conflicts and yearnings of our childhood all over again and maybe triumph over them or at least come to understand them — the second time around. Kingma and many others believe it's one of the ways we're able grow emotionally and move on with our lives.

An initial choice that has more to do with the past than the present may explain why so many of us try so hard to transform our spouse into someone who can give us the love, understanding, passion or any number of other qualities that seem to be missing from our marriage.

Experts agree that the best and only way to change the relationship dance between you and another person is to make changes in yourself. When you alter your part of the dance, the whole dance changes.

Neither marriage nor friendship is immune to the perils of dissolution. But if we're able to take a lesson from friendship and apply it to marriage, we may radically increase our chances for living "happily ever after."