Q. For the first time in my life, I know with complete clarity and certainty that I want to marry my boyfriend. I am a divorced woman of 36 and have never been more sure of anything in my life. He has just come out of a bad divorce and sometimes comments how he will never get married again. Should I give him more time or am I just wasting my time? How can I tell? -- K.J., Las Vegas

A. That's just it. You can't tell.

You say he has "just come out of a bad divorce." Then, frankly, there are lots of things you can't know. And I promise you there are even more things he can't know, even about himself.

Maybe "I'll never marry again" is just hyperbole. Just a rhetorical device for communicating pain and disillusionment. If that's the case, time will likely soften his position.

He might mean "I couldn't marry anyone now, and I'm not even close to considering that question." Then this, too, might well change with time.

However, "I'll never marry again" also could be expressing a very real shift in your boyfriend's worldview. He might, in fact, truly have rejected marriage as an option for himself.

And the brutal truth is that a lot of men (recently divorced or not) who say "I don't want marriage" or "I'll never marry again" actually mean to say "I will not be marrying you."

A bad divorce? What other kind of divorce is there? Your boyfriend is some combination of angry, grieving and guilty. If he's like most divorced people, he's in a tunnel of change and transformation. Even he doesn't know who he's going to be when he comes out the other side.

You are part of a "bridge relationship." You have met a man crossing a bridge from point A (his old life) to point B (the unknown new life). And you are not merely walking across the bridge with him; you are actually part of the bridge he's walking across. Who knows how large a part.

The nature of bridge relationships is that they are very time/space specific. People crossing the bridges of powerful change in their lives are focused on crossing the bridge; they have little capacity to be accountable for the future, at least not in any reliable way.

And your desire for marriage is a desire for him to be accountable for the future.

You ask, "Should I give him more time or am I just wasting my time?" Do you mean "Will I get a life partner out of this relationship?" The answer is you can't know. Neither can he. Do you mean by your question "Is this relationship a good risk?" The answer is it's a risky risk.

When a bridge relationship reaches the "other side," sometimes the relationship is renegotiated, reconfigured, stabilized in a new direction. I'm saying some bridge relationships are the beginning of deep and lasting unions into the future. But measured by my experience, bridge relationships more often lose momentum and end after the bridge is crossed. Statistically, the deck is stacked against you.

And there's no real way to hedge this bet.

Maybe you enjoy walking with this guy across this bridge. Maybe there's enough fun and creative things being discovered and shared to make it worthwhile apart from whether your boyfriend is ever a viable candidate for marriage. Maybe you're just flat curious about what's on the other side of the bridge. Maybe all this is worth the very real potential for heartache.

Or maybe you enjoy the challenge. Maybe there's a paradoxical safety for you in choosing a not-yet-completely-available boyfriend.

Maybe he's a part of your own bridge.

Steven Kalas is a behavioral health consultant and counselor at Clear View Counseling and Wellness Center in Las Vegas. Contact him at skalas@reviewjournal.com.