These things can take months or even years to understand, by which time it's often too late to back out if things don't fit quite right.
We're head-over-heels in love and we just have to convince ourselves that opposites attract and enjoy the makeup sex, right?
In my relationship, I've always had what I thought was quite a clear understanding of the differences, strengths and weaknesses each of us brought to the table.
While we both have businesses we are passionate about, my husband is very much the black-and-white capitalist of the family, while I feel I generate balance with my creative skills and community spirit.
Despite our differences, we have grown together over the years into what feels like a fairly perfect whole from two parts.
A yin-yang union that works pretty well, except in one area: emotions.
For years now I've assumed the issue was a fairly simple one: I had them, he did not.
With emotional intelligence (EI) the buzz-word for success in all areas of life including business and especially in relationships, I decided to prove a point to my husband by getting us both to complete a comprehensive online EI test that would reveal his deficiencies, inspire him to upskill and consequently create the perfect relationship. Easy-peasy.
Being the woman, and a talky/touchy-feely one at that, I naturally assumed I would breeze through with flying colours and hubby would limp into a lousy second place.
This made the results somewhat . . . shall we say . . . interesting? Okay, bloody devastating. There. I've admitted it.
While my emotional intelligence score came in with a respectable but unremarkable 70 per cent, my husband annihilated me with a jaw-dropping 96 per cent.
As I compared our detailed assessments, I was forced to concede that his silent, "unemotional" refusal to do that thing all women crave and "communicate" in the face of my oft-impassioned rants was perhaps not the result of a failure to be emotional, but instead a demonstration of emotional constraint.
Further navel-gazing suggested that having lots of emotions didn't mean I was in control of them, or even understood them.
The more I objectively considered my husband, the more obvious it became: the guy was an emotional Superman.
Seldom rattled, almost always reasonable, calm in the face of adversity and quietly confident in every aspect of his life, he was so emotionally intelligent he didn't even gloat about his very obvious triumph over me. Much.
Being the emotional greenhorn that I was, this knowledge did not sit well with me. What was to be my trump card, now?
Even worse, I suddenly looked at myself in a totally different way and saw rough edges where once I was perfectly smooth.
But determined to start closing the 26-point gap, I decided I would not be an old dog unable to learn new tricks.
My original goal was a better relationship, and if Yoda had to trade places with Luke to get it, then this Jedi would have the wisdom to accept that, if not the emotional intelligence to be cool about it.
