Rich and I are like chalk and cheese.

He’s good at maths, I’m good at English. (Watch me make some silly grammatical mistakes now). IMHO people tend to be good at one or the other. 

He’s up with the lark, which drives me crazy on weekends, because I am most definitely a night owl. (Or I was, until baby number two came along…)

He’s the class clown and often the butt of the joke. And he relishes it. Whilst I wouldn’t say I’m a shy retiring wallflower, I don’t crave being the centre of attention. This might be down to our introvert/extrovert preferences? When we worked for the company where we met, we had to do the Myers-Briggs Personality test. In a line of thirty people, arranged from the most extrovert on the left to the most introvert on the right, Rich was far and away the most extrovert, practically off the scales to the left; whereas I was somewhere in the middle: an introvert with extrovert tendencies.

He’s definitely a do-er and I’m a think-er. You know how I mentioned in my oak worktops post that the 2018 project for the Soeno household is to makeover the kitchen? Well Rich is chomping at the bit to start ripping out cupboards, whereas I would rather have a concrete idea of what the whole finished room is going to look like (or at least a vague plan re the basics, like worktops!), before we start making a mess.

Whilst we both love the idea of buying an old wreck of a house and completely renovating, I think we’d kill each other in the process. We’ve come close just assembling a Billy bookcase together.

Of course there are some similarities…I think it’d be true to say that our deep-rooted values are the same, and we both have the same, silly, some-might-say-immature sense of humour. (Think Gavin and Stacey meets Motherland).

But you know what? It works. The fact that he’s so different from me means that I am never, ever, bored in his presence, and I’d like to think that he’d say the same. And because we have such different views, we are excellent sounding boards when the other needs advice.

The fact that we are such opposites also works in a practical sense. When we were travelling, Rich would decide the next destination and figure out all the (in my view, tedious) logistics of how to get there, whilst I would pore over the Lonely Planet and figure out the finer, more fun, details: which one is the ‘cool’ neighbourhood to stay in, which beaches are best, which café does the best Eggs Benedict.

And ultimately, he makes me happy. Which is all that you can really ask for in a partner.

Are you the opposite of your other half? Do you share my view that opposites attract, or do you think like-minded people are generally more compatible?