4. Dialogue.

1) 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.

2) 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?

5. 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?