Spoiler
Just watched the finale a second time. Some observations:
1. Janice is projecting her own experience on to Ross - and all men, in fact. This is understandable, common, and maybe the best she can do to try to help Rachel, but it should not be confused with being right. We all like to think that our own experiences are typical and a good barometer of what someone else will do, and sometimes they are, but often they are not.
2. After Joey tries to reassure Rachel that Ross will be there, Rachel in fact argues that it would be unfair to expect Ross to turn down true love for her. She doesn't rant something like, "Oh come on, Ross is going to drop me at the first sign of trouble, blah, blah, blah." She imagines a scenario in which Ross should be expected to go a different way and in which she would not stand in his way. At the same time, she feels that this will be unfortunate for her.
3. Joey assures her that she will never be alone, that he will not let that happen. Though it could come to that, he has not yet said anything about him stepping in. He could easily be thinking about not letting Ross leave her alone.
4. Whatever you want to say about Joey's pained look on bended knee after Rachel says, "Okay", obviously it means, "something is wrong here". I suppose it is possible that he might warm to the idea now that he has stumbled into it, but I guarantee you he wasn't thinking that when he turned around. Furthermore, I think it is fair to assume that even if he gets swept up in the moment, it won't be too long before his conscience forces him to come clean about the fact that it was Ross' ring, not his own. The fact that it is actually Nana's ring, and that it was originally Ross' mom's idea is for Ross to reveal if and when he so chooses.
There are obviously a number of unanswered questions here. Like I said before, a picture may be worth a thousand words, but there's a lot of room in those thousand words for the imagination to conjure up wildly different speculations on what was meant. This works for art. It doesn't work very well for interpersonal relationships. --- James Squire - http://members.aol.com/jamess1889 IDF Soldiers' Combatant Letter 2002 - http://seruv.nethost.co.il/defaulteng.asp Personal Testimony of an Israeli Refusenik - http://www.shalomctr.org/html/peace84.html