Many successful marriages owe their happiness to friendship. This is something many don't really understand, and yet, it could contain the most precious formula for a really close and happy bonding.What is the difference between 'love' and 'friendship'? Naturally, all friends love each other; but all lovers are not necessarily friends!!

Either you have butterflies in your stomach, or you hear music in the air. Perhaps you're all tense and full of apprehension. Or you want to sing all day. It all depends on what type of person you are, but the occasion that inspires all these different feelings is a very special one – your first date with someone special.

Have you ever been in the company of a constantly bickering couple? They air their grievances like they own a radio station, they wash enough dirty linen in public to start a lucrative laundry, and they call each other's parents nasty names to the utter embarrassment and reluctant glee of all onlookers and listeners.

Compatibility takes so many forms. When we are young, shared interests in music and books, people and places, are enough to make us feel close to another. As we grow, different factors reinforce compatibility - after marriage, a shared view of parenting is undoubtedly one of the cementing elements in a relationship. But invariably, the changes wrought by life mean that people grow differently.

How do people who fall in love and get married drift away after many long years of marriage? This is a question disturbing quite a few among us in Indian metros, with a rising number of couples seeking to go their separate ways after twenty years or more of marriage.

It is not that uncommon any more to meet couples who are approaching the marriage counselor or the divorce courts for an end to their marriage fix. While marriages can develop cracks at any stage, the difficulties that arise in the initial years are often traumatic for the young couple involved. This series is an attempt to understand some of the factors that put great strain on the couple, and how these can be avoided or overcome.

This classic bedroom line epitomizes a real problem area of difference between men and women. While a man and woman may leap into bed with equal enthusiasm as newlyweds (the term is only descriptive - their feelings are never likely to be identical at any point!) the passing years of marriage see the emergence of uneven levels of sexual appetite.

Shailesh had no idea if every man who got married had a wife who was as attached to her mother as his wife was. For the first few months after their marriage, his wife Shweta would listen to a tape of her mother singing old Hindi film songs and cry her eyes out. Every chance she got, she was on the phone to her mother. Meanwhile, whenever his parents, who lived in the same town, even came over for a few hours, they would get indifferent treatment.

The richness and diversity of our culture has had paeans sung to it from as long as we can remember. But the many languages we speak, and the many ways we approach ordinary activities, whether it is lighting a lamp or cooking potatoes, make India a veritable minefield of conflicting practices and lifestyles. Perhaps because of this, a website like Bharat Matrimony categorizes the search for a life partner according to language and culture.

There is a wonderful line that Saif Ali Khan keeps saying from time to time in the wonderful film 'Hum Tum' based on the battle of the sexes - 'Zindagi bahut lambi hai...(life is very long)'. Whether or not one agrees with him, the fact is that life often gives us much more than a single opportunity to prove how loving, sincere, steadfast and trustworthy we can be.