Andrea Passman Candell knows firsthand what happens when a woman wants to tie the knot, and her boyfriend says "let's talk about it later."

When Candell moved to San Francisco from the East Coast in 1999, friends set her up with a nice Jewish man named Scot.

On their first date, Candell mentioned that she'd been taking drum lessons. "His face lit up and he said, 'Really, I happen to have a drum set at my house.' How many guys just happen to have a drum set in their garage?"

"We went back to Scot's, and he played the guitar. I was on the drums. I just kept playing the one beat I had memorized over and over."

Was it the cadence of love?

"That drum set now sits in our living room," she says. The journey to get the drum set there, however, was not so easy.

Candell says that for four years, friends and family asked her, "When are you two going to get engaged?" She, in turn, "started up with Scot with the 'When are we going to get engaged?' routine."

Ah, welcome to "pre-engagement limbo." That's "when she wants to tie the knot and he prefers to talk about it later," says Candell, who provides individual and small-group coaching and is planning a discussion group for women at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco.

Jewish families are certainly no stranger to this phenomenon, says Candell, who grew up in Newton, Mass., a suburb of Boston, where her family belongs to a Reform temple.

"What I've found in my Jewish community of friends is that, if they were dating their partners longer than the cousin getting married before them, the family wondered what was taking so long."

There's actually a name for this trend, she notes: It's called "passing them."

"If the woman is in a long-term relationship, and then she has a friend who's been dating her boyfriend for a shorter time and she gets engaged, she wonders, 'What's happening here?'"

Says Candell: "Women often feel embarrassed. They say, 'I'm in this relationship with a man, and he doesn't know if he wants to get married yet.'"

Moreover, in Jewish families, parents are often eager to jump right into the planning and celebrations. "With my Jewish friends who got married, their moms were really involved," she says. "It's a celebration of the couple, but it's also a celebration of the family. Parents feel like they're celebrating, too, so when they really want their daughter or son to speed it up, it's reflecting the parents."

But Candell's curiosity in the phenomenon of men's cold feet goes deeper than her own experience.

In graduate school at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, she was working on her master's in counseling psychology when she realized just how much women and men have trouble understanding each other when it comes to marriage commitment.

Speaking with clients who were dealing with this issue, some women would ask Candell, "What is taking my boyfriend so long to propose?" and "What is it with men and commitment?"

Men, on the other hand, wanted to know, "Why does she have to ask me about an engagement every day?" and "How can she understand that I'm just not ready to get married?"

Candell decided to write a paper on the pre-engagement stage, in which she explored: "What are men afraid of? What's going on in their minds that makes them afraid? And what's going on in women's minds?"

As she talked about this occurrence, she began to realize just how common it is. "I also had friends going through this," she says. "I realized that this is a passage itself in a relationship. I need to give a name to this."

She also realized how few resources were available to those in pre-engagement limbo.

Thus, "His Cold Feet" was born, Candell's coaching service. It's for women who are "frustrated because you want to tie the knot and your long-term partner still isn't ready for a marriage commitment."

She counsels those who might be overwhelmed with the engagement process, or simply trying to understand her boyfriend's cold feet. "The pre-engagement stage is an entire relationship passage in itself," Candell says.

"I got pushy and impatient," says Jill, a 31-year-old who was coached by Candell and prefers not to give her last name. "I would keep track of friends getting engaged. I'd get annoyed if they were together for a shorter amount of time than I was with my boyfriend."

In a nutshell, Candell's relationship-coaching practice is geared to help women improve communication with their partner so "they can get through pre-engagement together as a couple, rather than have limbo take over the relationship," according to Candell.

Her Web site, http://www.HisColdFeet.com, even led to a book deal. "It's going to be a survival guide. It's not about how to get him to propose, but how to get through this stage when a woman wants to get married before the man does," Candell says. No publication date has been set for the book, to be published by St. Martin's Press.

One of the most common situations that Candell sees is when a woman brings up marriage, and her boyfriend says, "Why do you have to bring this up? Why do we have to get into this?"

Candell advises: "The most important thing is for a woman to let the guy know that she understands it's a difficult transition for him.

"If a woman just says, 'I know this is really hard for you,' then the man ultimately feels understood. He knows that it's OK to feel conflict. So, the next step is that they can talk about their conflicts."

It's not that men don't want to make the commitment, she believes, it's just that they move a bit slower toward marriage.

And after she and Scot tied the knot in August 2003 in a ceremony officiated by her childhood rabbi, "The song we picked for our first dance was by Adam Sandler, 'Grow Old With You,' from the movie 'The Wedding Singer.'

"Friends still comment on how they got a kick out of that."