A while back, a man I know who was considering asking his girlfriend to marry him came to me for advice.  “How do you know,” he said, “that someone is the one?”  “It’s easy,” I replied.  I gave him a simple test to perform with his girlfriend.  The results came back positive.  (And no, you cynic, it wasn't a pregnancy test.) He asked her to marry him, and they’ve lived happily ever since.

I didn’t always think that compatibility was such an easy thing to determine.  It seemed terribly complicated.  In particular, I used to wonder about those marriages of seeming opposites: Mary Matalin and James Carville; Eddie Van Halen and Valerie Bertinelli; Edward Lewis and Vivian Ward.  I puzzled over how two people mismatched in disposition, social and/or economic background, political views or other essential points could function as a couple.  Then, I found myself in one of those marriages, and it didn’t seem so hard to understand any more.

Actually, I realized that my husband K— and I are opposites even before we were married, because our differences cropped up early and often.  For instance, philosophy.  As we got to know one another, K— learned that my motto for life was, “Treat others as you would like to be treated,” and I became familiar with his rather more fatalistic favorite maxim: “Live and die.”

When it came to everyday matters such as sleeping and eating, well, K— got acclimated to my normal morning routine of rising early, and I discovered that his reaction to an alarm clock going off at 4:30 AM is unprintable.  I slowly accepted that K—, at mealtimes, would smell everything I put in front of him suspiciously and ask if it was safe to eat, while K— reconciled himself to the fact that the answer to that question is always “yes,” regardless of any evidence to the contrary.

A weird factoid we noticed early in our relationship, and one that seemed to sum up our polarity, is that our birthdays are on the same day of the month but exactly six months apart.  Gleefully, we took that to mean that we are as opposite as the calendar will permit.

But when we looked around for some reinforcement of the idea that opposites can make a marriage work, we came up empty.  K— and I had had our little “opposite” joke for years and were long since married when I took a self-professed “love test” at a website.  It used our birthdays to calculate our likely compatibility.  Let’s just say that on a scale of 0 to 100 we garnered a really fabulous golf score, or alternatively, a very poor IQ.  Here’s what the compatibility program told me: “When you first met your Aquarius, it was truly a case of opposites attracting.  That means the two of you have a lot of interesting experiences to look forward to together.”  Of course, given the compatibility score it gave us, the implication was that it meant “interesting” in the Chinese sense.  Hardly a rousing show of support.  The program “assumed” (or whatever you want to call it) that while opposites can attract, the best you can say about them is that they make “interesting” couples…while they last.

No one gives opposites decent odds because they all make the mistake of confusing compatibility with similarity.  As far I can see, every dating service out there strives to pair people off based on their similarities.  One of them boasts about its personality profile of “unprecedented depth.”  In the name of research, I took the profile, being dishonest in only one respect: I claimed I was widowed so it wouldn’t eliminate me automatically. The result?  Evidently, I am unmatchable.  Their scientifically proven method cannot find me even one hypothetical mate from amongst the many thousands of eligible males registered with them.  That’s what similarities will get you.

If K— and I had gotten all hung up about our differences, we’d never have gotten married.  (Heck, if we’d been using that dating service, we never even would have met.)  We took the plunge without knowing the likelihood of success due to a perverse willingness to be guinea pigs.  But now I suspect our odds are better than conventional wisdom says.

K—, being fatalistic (remember “live and die?”), thinks he is unlucky, while I (because we are opposites) am always trying to point out how fortunate he is.  One day, I came home from work and he told me, “I bought a lottery ticket today, and I won $100!”  “That’s great!” I said, happy for him.  He got the ticket to show me, and I sidled up to look.  As I did, his face fell.  “Oh, no!” he moaned.  “I misread the instructions.  I’m not a winner after all.  Auggh!  Just my luck!”

I commenced telling him that being one of the twenty bazillion people who buy lottery tickets and fail to win did not make him unlucky, when he interrupted to say, “I’m going to think of two numbers, say…9 and 10.  I want you to pick one of them, but don’t tell me which one, and let me know when you’re ready.”  I chose 10 and told him to fire away.  “Okay,” he said, “I guess 9.”  I was forced to announce that he was wrong.  “See?” he said insistently.  “Even when the chances are 50/50, I still can’t win.  Pick two more.”  I thought about it and decided on 64 and 65, picking 64.  “65” he chanced as soon as I told him to guess.  This went on for some time, punctuated only by a few shots I took at guessing two numbers he picked.  The incredible thing was, neither one of us ever got a number right.  Then K— astutely observed, “You know what?  This would make a great compatibility game.”

This is the game I told my marriage-minded friend to try with his girlfriend.  Now I know what you’re thinking: the game tests similarity.  But it doesn’t.  What the game proves is that true compatibility overcomes odds and flies in the face of statistics.  It’s as weird and unpredictable as flipping a coin 20 times and having it not just come up heads every time or tails every time, but land on its side every time.

So, the long and the short of it is that I advocate the marriage of opposites.  Okay, so Eddie and Valerie called it quits eventually, and Edward and Vivian are fictional.  As far as I know, Mary and James haven’t dissected each other in the media yet, so the odds for us opposites are probably as good as for the public at large.  And at the very least, marrying your opposite keeps things, well, interesting.