What Do They See in Each Other?

We all know one of those couples who prove "opposites attract." He’s an accountant, down-to-earth, says what he thinks, doesn’t care a whit if his opinion’s unpopular. She’s insecure, eager to be accepted socially, invited to parties, frets constantly about conversational nuances and their social pecking-order consequences.

I shake my head when I spend time with these two. Why on earth are they married? For 40 years no less.

I could give more examples—couples who seem an abysmal mismatch. Consider Jack Sprat (probably skinny) and his (presumably rotund) wife. Yet as the nursery rhyme tells us these idiosyncrasies result in a perfect pairing:

Jack Sprat could eat no fat
His wife could eat no lean
And so betwixt the two of them
They licked the platter clean.
When I met my husband, he shared a rambling old house with four young bachelors. A friend engaged to one of the housemates kept trying to play matchmaker. She eliminated my future husband from the pool of three, insisting we wouldn’t get along. After being introduced at a party by another acquaintance, we laughed and talked the rest of the night. We had a chemistry my friend never predicted. The result: a thirty-six year marriage.

Bottom line? I’ve quit asking what makes people fall in love, become a couple, and, perhaps, most importantly, stay a couple. We see their public faces, but not the private ones. We’re not privy to shared laughter, the values that bind, intimate thoughts, whispered conversations or physical attraction.

I guess that’s why we’ve chosen Cupid to represent Valentine’s Day. Since attraction and love are such a mystery, it’s easy to blame love on an arrow that may not have flown as straight as Cupid intended.

So here’s a toast to all those linkages that baffle outsiders and amuse lovers. After all, these love stories provide the fodder for some of the best romance novels!

What “novel” lovers would you nominate as the most unlikely to wind up together, yet end the book in a happy-ever-after romance?