I can't figure this out.

I've been with my girlfriend for 3 years now, and things have been going good, however, differently from relationships I've been in before, and herein lies the problem. I feel like our relationship is stagnating. It has been three years, and we have only spent 3 nights together in all that time. We see each other once or twice a week, sometimes for only a couple of hours. We both have jobs, and she is going to University (I've already graduated) so we don't have a lot of time together. Lately she's been talking a lot about marriage, but I can't possibly imagine marrying somebody with no idea of how we're going to be once we live together. I've seen too many of my friends casually walk into marriage, with no experience being together with their partner, only to be divorced and penny-less a year later.

It is here that it becomes important to note that we have different cultural backgrounds, I am from a white Protestant background, but do not actively practice or participate in any religion. She is of Arab decent, and her family is Orthodox Christian, although she herself is a non-participant, her family is very religious.

I know that her mother has been fairly abusive to her over the years, in an attempt to get her to be more willing to take a woman's role in a traditional Arab culture, while my girlfriend, having been born in Canada, doesn't feel any responsibility to fill a traditional role when as a Canadian, she is granted far more freedoms. But, from fear of her mothers judgment, she seems incapable of moving forward with our relationship in any meaningful way. She curses her mother's values, and says she wants freedom, but every time I offer her an alternative, she dodges, or gets nervous. She instead brings up marriage as the ultimate solution, but as I said earlier, I belive it is truly unfair to either of us to commit to a marriage, without any idea what-so-ever if it will work or not.

Now, I know, some of you may have conservative views toward marriage, and say, if you love her, you'll marry her, and that's that, but I can't settle for that. I don't want to jump into marriage with her, preceisely because i DO love her. I also want to be realistic. We've been officially together for 3 years, but we haven't spent nearly that much time together. I worked it out, seeing each other once or twice a week, sometimes for only a few hours at a time, that in those three years, we've only functionally seen each other around 320 times, and only 3 of those were nights spent together. How, can I possibly be expected to commit the rest of my life to somebody if we can't even feel out what it will be like to live together? I would love to take it on the faith that love will triumph over all, but objective experience pretty much nails up that coffin. I only like to bet on sure things, and the only way to tell if this is a sure thing, is to move forward and try out living together. At least that way, if after a month, we both want to kill each other, we can chaulk it up to not being meant for each other, and go our seperate ways. If we live well together, and have a great time, then marriage becomes more realistic. But, because her family is Orthodox, if we do get married, we can never be divorced, at least as far as her church is concerned. Once we take that step, it's forever. There is no divorce in the Orthodox church, and that means that, even if after a few years of marriage, she decided she hated me and needed somebody else, her church would never accept our divorce, and she would never be able to marry again, which is extremely unfair to her.

Now, here's where it gets sticky, and this is where I keep hanging up. If her reserved-ness about moving in together, or heck, even spending more nights together were purely about her religious convictions, I could accept that. The trouble I have is that she has no such convictions, and is only worried about what her family would think. I wouldn't even have an issue with that, if I didn't know for a fact that before we dated, she took a stand against her mother and moved half way across the country to be with a guy she'd known online, but had never met in person. She took that stand for love, even though she had no idea weather or not she and this dude would be compatible or not. She took a complete chance on it, and was willing to take that judgement from her mother on a bet, and a bad one as it turned out, because their relationship didn't last long at all. But we've been together for 3 years, we know we work well together, we have a great relationship, an active and passionate sex-life and we trust each other. But she obviously doesn't trust me enough to take the same stand she's taken before against her mother, and I can't for the life of me figure out why.

Any time I try to talk to her about it, she gets extremely uncomfortable and does whatever she can, even to the point of trying to seduce me to avoid the discussion, but whenever I bring up the question of how she really feels about me, she assures me she loves me more than anything, and can't imagine life withouth me. I'm going crazy. There are things in life that I would like to start doing, but because I seem to be stuck in this perpetual will-we won't-we game, I can't take the steps needed to further my career.

Am I being selfish to think this way? I really do love her, but don't want to rush into something that could be disasterous for both of us, until we're pretty sure it's going to work. I know she doesn't really want to get married, and sees it only as a way to placate her parents judgement, but marriage means more than that to me, and before I make that kind of commitment, I want to know damn well that I mean it. Is if unfair to ask her to explore taking a stand against her parents if it means we get to fully explore what it will be like to be together that way prior to signing on the dotted line?

I'm completely lost, and have no idea what to do. I'm tired of just wait to see what will happen.

Any suggestions internet?